


Now I'll be bold as well as strong

by Thorne



Category: Men's Hockey RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M, Washington Capitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-16 21:57:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21278378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorne/pseuds/Thorne
Summary: "You're getting simultaneously cockblocked and set up by a magical unicorn," he finally says, and then Nicke sighs and rubs at his temples because somehow Andre always,alwaysmanages to zig where others zag.





	Now I'll be bold as well as strong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Guzmanasol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guzmanasol/gifts).

> Guzmanasol, you gave me a blank check for being ridiculous, and I hope you don't mind that I ran with it. Thank you! Some notes/warnings at the end.

"Oh, _real_ fucking funny," Andre says from somewhere in the lounge, and Nicke pays no attention to it until he hears scuffling noises as well as Willy laughing, and he glances up just in time to see Andre and Willy doing… something together near the center of the lounge, somewhere between a playfight and an actual one. Willy's handicapped by the fact he can't seem to stop laughing and he's only got one arm to work with, since the other is balancing a tray of Starbucks drinks, but he seems to be getting by on sheer bulk, using his free arm to fend off Andre. Andre has both arms free and is flailing them around Willy's shoulders, doing his best to either grab Willy for a headbutt, put him in a headlock, or just straight up pull his hair, not that any of the potential efforts seem like they're really succeeding.

Nicke instinctively looks to his left so that he can send Mackan in to retrieve Andre, by the scruff if necessary, and then he remembers that Mackan's in New Jersey, on another team, and annoyingly unavailable for Andre-related delegations. Ovi is a few seats away and smirking directly at him, because by nationality-related locker room laws, this is Nicke's problem to fix, even though he and Ovi have split responsibility on Vee and Willy—

("He calls you dad on twitter, Willy's your kid," Ovi had said.

"He's on your line with Kuzy right now, so he's your kid," Nicke had shot back.

"You call him and Latts your kids and say you take family picture," Ovi had said. "I saw it. You said on twitter, so it's official."

"That wasn't even this season," Nicke had said. "And anyway, he's Canadian, so really this should be on Holts."

"He's not goalie, plus we give Walks to Holts already," Ovi had said. "Let's trick Batya into it."

"You know, Ovi, you can't trick me into doing anything when I'm sitting right next to you and can hear you discussing it," Orpik had said, rather pointedly.

"I can _hear all of you_," Willy had said from across the locker room. "You're giving me, like, an abandonment and self-esteem complex. I'm going to need therapy.")

—that they tend to settle with Ovi in charge of on-ice events and Nicke in charge of off-ice events, and single-elimination rock-paper-scissors deathmatches to resolve anything else.

So, this is technically under Nicke's watch. And Andre's getting that mulish expression on his face that means if he doesn't do something soon, Andre's going to escalate from ineffectual flailing to more determined flailing, and then he's still going to bounce off Willy like a bug hitting a windshield, probably injure himself in some dumbass way, and then they're down another player in addition to Willy's suspension. Or Willy will end up dropping the Starbucks tray, since his suspension has him on coffee boy duty for the duration, and he'll make a mess, and no one will get their drinks, and then at least half a dozen more members of the team end up unhappy. And most importantly in this whole thing, _Nicke's_ coffee is on that tray, and the sooner he resolves this, the sooner he gets his own coffee.

Delegation is still an option, though. Mostly because Nicke doesn't have anything handy that he can throw at them, except possibly his snus container.

"Christian," Nicke says, and two seats away, Christian immediately freezes and then turns towards Nicke expectantly. Nicke nods his head towards Andre and Willy. "Deal with that."

"Um," Christian says, and looks like he's waiting for further instructions. Nicke just stares back at him and raises an eyebrow because he might as well break him in early. He's also curious to see if Christian's creative, or strategic, or if he's somehow got hidden wrestling abilities.

"Uh," Christian says. "Okay. Um. Okay."

He gets up and sidles over to the tussle, hovering nearby without trying to break in right away. He still has a vaguely worried look on his face, but after monitoring it constantly through pre-season, Nicke's mostly sure that's just his regular resting facial expression. He doesn't look back at Nicke, which Nicke approves of. But then he doesn't do anything either, just keeps shifting from foot to foot.

Just when Nicke is considering sacrificing his snus and winging it into the mess of youthful hormonal idiocy, though, Christian makes his move and somehow _eels_ his way between Andre and Willy in one quick shimmy that makes both Andre and Willy jerk back away from each other, and he takes the opportunity of their pause in fighting to grab one of the drinks off the tray at the same time.

"Do you want mine?" he asks Andre, shoving it at him. "Will that make it better?"

Andre blinks, looking derailed. "It's—no, but. You don't need to. It's, just. Willy's an _asshole_. It's the first roadtrip and I just want to do my thing. He's messing with my thing."

Ah. Given Andre's various superstitions and pre-game rituals about what he eats and drinks and does, things make more sense now. Nicke mentally awards Christian some rookie points for figuring out the problem, and tacks an extra couple points on for offering to share. 

"It just was a joke, Jesus," Willy says, but he does look somewhat chagrined. Nicke also takes away five rookie points from Willy, who's not only already completely out of points because of his suspension but should also really know better than to wind Andre up on the first roadtrip of the year. Willy has a negative balance of points right now, and it's only going to go lower if he's also messed with anyone else's order.

Christian shrugs. "I don't mind. We usually get the same thing, so. You can have mine if you want."

"I just wanted _mine_," Andre says mutinously, giving Willy a glare. "Look at this thing."

He shoves the cup at Christian, who obediently looks at it with due seriousness. "Huh," he says.

Something pokes him in the side, and Nicke looks over to see Ovi leaning in. "Take points from Willy," he says. Ovi doesn't do points like Nicke; he has a complicated sushi-based reward system he uses on all the kids when they do well, and the highest achievements get the full hibachi restaurant treatment. It's fairly effective, Nicke will give him that.

"I already did," Nicke says, and then raises his voice. "What the hell is going on?" he calls over, and all three of them look back at him.

"Willy fucked up my drink order on purpose," Andre says, though the scowl is sliding into more of a pout. "Look."

Andre almost always gets an iced coffee with two pumps of vanilla syrup before games, and there's also a whole complicated thing about how many sips he consumes it in. What he's holding is very much not that.

"No, I didn't do it on purpose, I swear," Willy says. "It was just, like, I went to get the order and I got that barista who always wants to talk—"

"Flirt, babe," Carly says from where he's buried in the crossword puzzle. "She wants your stick."

Willy ignores him. "And she was all, hey, check it out, I made this for you all special, and she gave me that drink and she really wanted me to, like, try it right there, and she kept pressuring me to drink it and say if it was good or not, and then I got the ten minute warning text from O, so I just had to grab everything and go, and I'm sorry, Burky, seriously. You've seen her before, she's like super intense. I had to bail."

The drink is one of those frappuccino things in a tall cup, and it's very… pink. And blue. And swirly. And there's enough whipped cream and colored sprinkle things on it to make Brooks Orpik go to Level 3 Crazy Eyes in five seconds flat. Hell, it makes Nicke's teeth hurt just looking at it.

"Hey, is that one of those unicorn frapps?" Oshie asks. "Shit, I thought they stopped making those. Like, they were a limited time thing back in the spring. I got Lyla one once just for fun, and then she threw a fit when they stopped doing it."

Willy shrugs. "I dunno. She just kept saying she made it special for me on the house. And I gave it to Burky because it was kinda cute when she made it, and who's cuter than Burky?"

The drink might have looked cute or like a unicorn when it was first made, but a trip across the airport and into the charter lounge, and all of the shoving has it looking rather the worse for wear. If it's a unicorn, it's one that's been through a nuclear blast and is currently mutating into a new way of life that probably involves less bones.

"Anyway, you didn't even try it, you just started punching me," Willy said. "Maybe see if it actually tastes good, doofus. If you hate it, I promise I'll buy you your regular drink as soon as we get to Ottawa."

"I won't want it then," Andre says, but he raises the straw to his mouth and takes a slurp. He screws his face up. "It's weird. Christian, you try it." He practically shoves the straw into Christian's mouth, who looks startled but takes a sip.

"Gross, Burky, you're gonna give him your germs," Willy says.

Andre ignores him and keeps pushing the cup at Christian. "See? See?"

Christian looks like he's trying not to grimace. "It's… sweet. But not."

"Let me see it."

Andre hands it over, still looking wounded and put-upon. Nicke pulls off the lid and ignores the straw, looking at the rapidly melting colorful mess before he takes a sip directly from the cup and tries not to grimace at the taste; it's artificially fruity, and very sweet but with a sour aftertaste at the same time. There's a weird grittiness from the colored powder that's swirled through it, and he hopes that it hasn't stained his mouth a weird color.

"_See_," Andre says, watching his face. "Nicke doesn't like it."

"It's—" Nicke takes another small sip and then gives up, reaching over to hand it back. "Yeah. It's weird."

"Let me," Ovi says, and makes _gimme-gimme_ motions with his hand until Nicke gives it to him instead. He doesn't bother with the straw either, just gulps right from the cup as well and then smacks his lips thoughtfully. "Huh. Yeah, weird. Like, not bad, but… hmm. I think I like it."

"You would," Nicke says, and Ovi just grins at him and ostentatiously licks his lips. The tip of his tongue is tinged blue.

"Let me try it, babe," Oshie says, and Carly says, "Yeah, I want to try it too," and then Kuzy just straight up grabs it from Ovi to take a swig, and a minor commotion erupts that's like a cross between a goalmouth scramble and one of those feeding frenzy scenes Nicke saw on some Shark Week episode back in the summer. Andre is in the middle of it again, making shrieking noises that could indicate either fury or delight. By the time everyone's finished grabbing at the cup and ignoring Brooks's overly loud comments about what that kind of high fructose corn syrup was probably doing to all of them, the cup's nearly empty and Trotz is coming over to see what's going on.

"Boys," he says in his gravelly voice, and everyone stops fucking around and stands a little straighter. Vee belatedly tries to hide the cup behind his back. Trotz gives them all the stare for a good ten seconds, and then shakes his head. "Consider keeping some of this energy for Ottawa."

"We gonna do it, coach, don't worry," Ovi says earnestly, and there's a mumbling of agreement from everyone in response.

Trotz nods and then turns. "Time to board. Let's get a move on."

Everyone's grabbing hold of their carry-on shit after that, heading over to the hallway that'll spit them out on the runway where they can board the charter plane. Nicke takes his time, letting most of the others get ahead of him while keeping an eye on the kids. Vee's already handed the cup back to Andre, who looks rumpled but distinctly perked up from being in the middle of a free-for-all a few minutes ago. Andre thrives on physical contact no matter how it comes; Nicke would find it stranger if he hasn't had Ovi and his complete lack of regard for personal space literally draped over him for so many years.

"You might as well throw it away," Willy says. He rubs the back of his neck. "Seriously, sorry, I'll buy you another one when we land."

"I'm keeping it," Andre says defiantly and takes a swallow. He winces again, and then finishes it anyway.

"Get moving," Nicke says, and nudges both of them. Christian's hovering nearby, and Nicke nods towards him. "You walk with me."

Christian still looks nervous, and Nicke takes pity on him once Andre and Willy have trotted far enough ahead to be out of earshot. "Good job," he says.

"Thank you?" Christian says, voice tilting up into a question.

"Sometimes Andre gets too wrapped up in his pre-game shit," Nicke says. "You did good." He takes another look at Christian, who's hauling a dufflebag as his carry-on, and decides to dispense some veteran advice since seems like he has someone who's actually paying attention to what he's saying for once. "You should get some luggage with wheels."

Christian nods like Nicke just told him the secret to life, or how to win the Cup. "I wanted to wait until they told me I'd be staying in DC instead of Hershey."

"That's smart," Nicke says. He tries to think of anything else Christian might want or need to know. "You already know where rookies sit on the plane. But if you need to ask for anything, you can come up front. If I'm asleep or something, just ask Brooks or Ovi. The same at the hotel, too."

Christian nods again, and now they're on the tarmac, some of the last to board. Andre's mood's done one of those lightning turnarounds, and he has his phone out and is yelling some nonsense at Willy, probably putting it on twitter or Instagram or one of the dozen social media platforms that he pinballs between. Nicke screws his eyes up against the brightness of the sunshine, and he can already feel sweat prickling on his back through the layer of suit and shirt; it still feels like summer right now. DC gets all four seasons, but they arrive and depart at their own discretion with a distinct lack of logic or predictability.

When they reach the steps to board, Ovi's waiting there, one-thumb texting on his phone with a speed that speaks of long practice and a cheerful disregard for proper spelling, slouching more wrinkles into the blue suit he's been wearing for years and refusing to retire. That suit has survived multiple chirping sessions, Caps Calendar Canine shoots, accidental and not-so accidental spills, and media sessions in every city in the league. Nicke thinks it might actually be indestructible, the same as Ovi.

Christian stops when they get to the plane, unsure. Nicke shoves him lightly in the back. "Go up. You're going to be fine."

Christian walks up, though this time he does look back at Nicke and Ovi before disappearing into the plane. Ovi nods his head at him and mimes blowing a kiss; Christian blushes, and then he hurries inside. Ovi turns his smile on Nicke and shoves a cup of coffee at him while still texting with his other hand.

"I figure, I get your coffee before Willy drops it and Backy starts murders. Bad if we show up for Ottawa with half Caps team all dead."

"Only half?" Nicke says and takes a long sip of actual coffee, savoring the way it gets rid of the sticky-sweet taste still coating his mouth. "You don't think I can kill everyone on the team?"

"Not everyone," Ovi says. "Vee's baby, plus he's fast. You don't kill Osh or Holts or Carly, because you like them. You don't kill me, because you like me best and I give you coffee."

"You did give me coffee," Nicke agrees. "You're my favorite. For now."

"I'm always favorite," Ovi says, tapping his thumb rapidly several times on the screen—someone is getting a lot of smilies—before shoving his phone in his pocket. "You just sometimes get mad and forget. It's okay, I remind you."

"Yeah, right," Nicke says and heads up the stairs, Ovi chuckling quietly behind him. Everyone is settling into the plane in orderly fashion. His own seat is open and ready, and he rummages through his pickets for his earbuds and everything else he wants to have on hand for takeoff.

"Hello, Nicke!" he hears Andre call out cheerfully, and looks up to see Andre filming him, with Christian already settled in next to him. Christian looks less anxious now, and more excited.

Nicke can't help but smile at the sight, because they're young and happy and stupidly unaware of how fast time is going, never mind that they're at the start of a season without the first game even played yet. The season is sitting lightly on them in a way that Nicke can't help but envy. To them, it's another chance, another opportunity, no matter what everyone says about their window to win closing. And why shouldn't they feel that way, with their careers still only beginning? He wishes it was still that easy, to look forward to the season's start without it inextricably coupled with how the memories of how the past seasons have ended still make him want to clench his teeth and break everything within reach.

At least they're not opening in Pittsburgh again, although it's probably only because the optics of the league doing that two years in a row would have been difficult to ignore. No matter how much it feels like the league is dicking them around with their schedule, giving them the front row seat to the Hawks and the Pens raising the banner, he knows there's no conspiracy, he really does. But that's only because he knows the league is too goddamn stupid to ever truly pull one off. It's galling regardless, and something he can't stop feeling, like poking at a sore spot in his mouth with his tongue.

It surprises him sometimes, to realize how angry he is all the time. He didn't used to feel this way. It's almost interesting.

For now, he puts it aside because the only useful thing to do with it is use it on the ice, and that's still hours away. It's a beautiful day, and he's getting to do the thing he loves most in the world for a living, and he has coffee. Despite it all, things could be worse.

***

A lot happens in the first week's stretch, not the least of which is Ovi blowing the doors off the NHL's goal lead by stacking up seven goals in the first two games, so Nicke doesn't immediately pick up on the warning signs. They alternate home and away games for the first four of the season, and there's the usual run of charity and PR and media events for their off ice time. They're all busy.

The first time Nicke begins to get more of an inkling that something is wrong, it's because Andre is wandering around half naked in the locker room. Admittedly, that's not too unusual, but he's been looking for his pants for fifteen minutes now (last seen in Carly's grasp) and every time he passes in front of Nicke, the inside of Nicke's nose prickles and he needs to sneeze. The fourth time this happens, Nicke throws a roll of tape at him and tells him to just go look in Eller's locker already.

"Fine, shit, okay," Andre says, but then he comes back with his pants and starts changing a couple stalls down from Nicke, and Nicke's sinuses all start streaming again like it's spring and the trees are jizzing into the air as much as possible solely to make Nicke's life miserable.

"Are you wearing a new cologne or something?" Nicke asks before he sneezes, and wipes irritably at his face with his sleeve. He sniffs at the air, trying to figure out what it is. It's… musky, and a little sweet, but not the same as the nearly visible cloud of body spray that Andre used to leave behind in the bathroom after his grooming routine during those weeks that he was living with Nicke. It's bothering him. It's not like the usual things that trigger his allergies, but he feels like he's experienced it before, and he can't put his finger on when he did. It feels like an old memory, maybe something from home, when he was younger.

Andre pauses, halfway into wiggling into his jeans. "No?" he says, but he looks a little shifty.

Nicke eyes him. "Something is making me sneeze."

"Your allergies are bad again?" Andre asks.

"Maybe," Nicke says. He sneezes twice in a row, and then takes a deep breath, and another suspicious whiff. The closest thing it reminds him of is the holistic shop that's next to an independent book store Holtby took him to once. God, maybe Andre is getting into crystals, or worse, essential oils. That's all he needs, to deal with fishing Andre out of a combined quagmire of superstitions based on shiny rocks and pyramid schemes. "You smell funny. Seriously, did you change your soap or something?"

"I have to go," Andre says, and he bolts out of the locker room without even fixing his hair first. Nicke thinks about hunting him down before he can get to his car—that look on his face absolutely screamed guilt, so there's _something _he's fucked up somewhere, and Nicke should probably figure out what it is and how to fix it. With Andre, there are no hypotheticals, only impending consequences.

But the more he thinks about what it might be, the more he realizes that Andre's been less around than usual the past two weeks. Around Nicke, anyway. He's turned down dinner invites three times. Nicke's seen him here and there, giving Devo a ride home after practice, heading out to lunch with Vee and Willy, but they've been on different lines in practice and in games, and he hasn't gotten the usual sheepish barrage of texts asking him to come over and fix something in the apartment that Andre's bought or broken.

That should be good—it means Andre is probably just pestering Willy to help him instead, or that miracle of miracles, he's growing up and taking care of shit himself. It feels a little odd, though. He'd expect Andre to be bragging about it to the entire team, and to Nicke as well.

He should ask Mackan if he noticed anything weird when they were in Jersey. Mackan used to have better success at coaxing (and sometimes bullying, more or less lovingly) things out of Andre that he'd clam up about around Nicke. The fighting major in Jersey certainly hadn't been usual, and Nicke's been waiting to talk to Andre about squeezing the stick too hard because Andre's no doubt already down on himself for it. Managing Andre's self-esteem is like trying to keep a complicated plant alive, like a bonsai tree, or an orchid, or something. There's a lot of judicious pruning or nurturing involved, and it requires a delicate touch. Long practice and various disasters have made Nicke careful.

He sneezes one more time, and then makes his way to his own car and home.

Once he's back home, he flops on the couch and brings up the group chat, which was buzzing steadily in his pocket on the drive home; he's missed a significant portion of an argument about food mascots and their fuckability, which segued into a more specific argument about cereal mascots and their fuckability, swerved sharply into some frank discussion about whether bestiality counted if it was with a cereal mascot, and ultimately culminates with a picture of someone's dick stuck in a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. He doesn't have to look twice to know it's Ovi's.

There's some scattered comments after that about who would win in a Hunger Games scenario set in McDonald Land (everyone agrees that Ronald McDonald has to be excluded since he's probably the grand architect of the bloodbath, but Carly is backing the Hamburglar and Oshie is insisting that it's Grimace's fight to lose; no one supports Mayor McCheese), but it's nowhere near as busy a debate now, as everyone's probably settling down for their afternoon naps.

He pulls up Andre's name and opens a text to invite him to dinner, but then reconsiders. It'll be easier to just offer him a ride to the airport for their next game, and ambush him in the car; failing that, he can corner him on the plane. He closes the text message without sending it, sets his usual nap alarm, and makes his way upstairs. In the bathroom, he grabs a wad of toilet paper to blow his nose into once more, and then looks into his medicine cabinet to consider whether or not he wants to take a Benadryl, but he decides he can probably do without it.

The Zyrtec D bottle is next to the Benadryl. Nicke thinks for roughly the thousandth time that it's stupid to look at something as innocuous as an allergy medication logo and automatically feel so fucking angry that it makes him involuntarily suck his lips in over his teeth in a hard-clenching line, but it does, and it will probably keep doing so. Maybe in another four years—but maybe not.

Nicke catches a look at his reflection in the mirror and deliberately relaxes his jaw. Ovi told him once he carries his anger in his mouth; it was after the 2014 Olympics and both he and Ovi had been tremendously drunk at the time, so Nicke hadn't been sure if Ovi had been making a metaphor or speaking literally, but he's never forgotten it.

His bed is waiting. Nick breathes in, breathes out, and puts the anger away in his mind in one of the boxes he keeps it in. He takes his nap, and when he wakes up, Devo and Conno are throwing down in the chat over whether the Kool Aid Man could drown his enemies within his pitcher body, or if he could be easily defeated via exsanguination from within by a potential victim. The team is split almost completely down the middle on this, so Nicke takes the time to add his comment siding with Devo, not necessarily because he thinks the Kool Aid Man has the clear-cut upper hand, but because Devo's been shy about jumping into group chat arguments until now and Nicke wants to encourage him.

His phone chimes, and a text message pops up from Andre.

_Hey can u come over and help me wiht something please_

Well, this is a return to normalcy. He types back a response.

_Sure. When?_

Andre responds immediately. _Now? If ok. Thnaks_

_Ok. Should I bring my normal tools?_

Three dots and the typing bubble pop up. He waits for a few seconds and then Nicke stretches and gets up, looking around for his jeans while Andre finishes describing or taking pictures of whatever the hell he's trying to put together from Ikea now. But when he checks his phone again, there's nothing, though the bubble is still there. Finally, he just gets a single word:

_no_

That's probably worth an eyebrow raise. But he's dressed, and he has nothing else really planned for the rest of the day. He finds his basic toolbox anyway, grabs his second-best drill and an extension cord because he'll no doubt need it if he doesn't bring it, throws everything in the trunk, and he's on his way.

Nicke's parked and in the lobby of Andre's apartment complex before he realizes he forgot to take anything at the house for his allergies when he'd woken up. He'll have to just wait to take some Benadryl before he goes to bed, otherwise he'll throw off his sleeping schedule. And of course, the tissue box in his car is empty. He'll just have to hope for the best.

He's already in the elevator before thinking he should see if Willy's in the building as well, or if he's already at Andre's. Willy's managed to climb into a positive rookie points differential over the past two weeks, and by the rules is therefore eligible for a low-level reward of either one non-team lunch, or three new songs on the locker room music playlist that Ovi is not allowed to reject.

When he knocks on Andre's door, it takes a long time for Andre to answer. He looks rumpled and a little flushed, like he was working out, or doing some other potentially side-eye worthy thing. When Nicke reaches out to give him the standard one-armed shoulder hug, Andre takes a non-subtle side step to skitter away from it. Nicke's internal alarms, dormant since the text asking him to come over, all start firing up on red alert again.

"What's up?" he asks, and steps inside. "Did you just get up? Sorry."

"Thanks for coming," Andre mumbles, already swinging away to the kitchen. "Can I get you something to drink?"

The alarms rachet up to klaxons. "Sure," he says. "Get me some water."

"Okay, come on," Andre says, but as he does, there's a crash, a thud, and then a scuffling noise from the kitchen, and they both jump. It's followed by an angry snorting noise, distinctly animal in nature.

"Oh shit," Andre says miserably.

"Did you get a dog?" Nicke asks, and then revises his question, based on what's more or less likely for Andre. "Did you find a stray dog, feel bad about it, bring it home, and then have it break shit in your house?"

If so, Andre's getting _all _his rookie points docked, self-esteem issues or not, and Nicke is going to punt this to Ovi to deal with_ immediately_, locker room nationality laws be damned.

"It's not my fault," Andre says, and then he pushes open the kitchen door and Nicke can see inside.

It's not a dog. It's a unicorn.

There isn't even a moment of cognitive dissonance. It's a _unicorn_. It can't be anything other than a unicorn; any chance at it being an extremely well-disguised horse in service of an elaborate prank dwindles the longer Nicke looks at it, squinting from all angles.

(In the heyday of his feud with Malkin, Ovi had once spent a couple thousand dollars buying up every Malkin bobblehead on ebay he could get his hands on for some elaborate gaslighting scheme of a prank that Nicke still doesn't know all the particulars on, but that had Ovi looking smug for months afterward, huddled away in a corner of the locker room with Sasha Semin and replaying what sounded like angry Russian voicemails on his phone while they laughed uproariously. But this looks beyond even Ovi's scope of effort).

It's white, but not just white; it's very… pearly. It's _sparkling_. It also has its horn stuck through one of Andre's kitchen cabinet doors and is trying to extricate it. When it does jerk free, chunks of pressboard and wood splinters shower onto the floor.

"What the fuck," Nicke says, staring. "Where did you get that? Did you get drunk and order it online?"

Andre almost collapses in a boneless heap against the door. "Oh my God, you can see it too. Thank fuck," he says, voice trembling.

"I mean, of course I can see it," Nicke says, not taking his eyes off it. "How can you not see it? It's a _unicorn_. In your kitchen."

"I can see it, Tom can't!" Andre almost shouts. "I had him come in and look around and he didn't see _anything_ and he thought I was crazy and_ I_ thought I was crazy, and then it started, like. _Following me._ Like, I locked the door and I thought it would be gone or I'd wake up or something, but it follows me! It was in the locker room with us today! It was in _New Jersey_. Like, I don't know, I didn't see it on the plane but maybe it flew or something. It might be able to teleport."

"Wings would make it a pegasus, not a unicorn," Nicke says, and then thinks that is possibly the singularly most useless thing he's ever said.

Meanwhile, the unicorn doesn't seem to be taking much notice of what's going on, now that it's gotten unstuck from the cabinet. It's nosing along at Andre's kitchen counters, which it can just about reach. Nicke has no real experience with horses, but it's not as big as most of the ones he's seen; it's smaller and more pony-sized. Dainty, almost, with slender legs and a gracefully arched neck. Its mane is slightly darker than its blindingly white coat; there's a silvery tint to it. And the tail is different, not like a normal horse's tail—it's almost feline, more like a lion, long and slender but with a tuft of that same silvery hair at the end. There's a similar tuft under its chin, like he's seen on goats. Its eyes are large and an unsettling black, barely any white visible.

The horn is what his eyes keep returning to, though. It's whorled and gleams like bone, at least two feet long and tapering to a lethal-looking point. It's just—_there_, growing out of its forehead.

"Is it real," Nicke asks. It looks solid, and he wonders what would happen if he touched it, or if he even should, and even as his hand automatically lifts to reach out, there's a sudden warning itch in the back of his throat. And just like that, he sneezes rapidly three times in a row; his eyes are tearing up, and…

Fuck. It _is_ real. These aren't his normal allergies. He should have known when he started smelling patchouli back in the locker room.

"Fuck," he says. Then, "All right, tell me everything."

Andre still looks like he's on the verge of tears. "You can see it, though," he says again. There's something else there, too. He gives Nicke a funny sidelong look, like he's just waiting for another shoe to drop. "And it's not making you, like… feel weird?"

Nicke sneezes. "It's going to keep setting off my fucking allergies until I get to my pills," he says. "But I should be okay otherwise."

"I didn't think you were allergic to horses," Andre says.

"I'm allergic to magic," Nicke says shortly, and waves a hand. "Look, let's just go sit down for a second. I need a tissue."

Of course, Andre doesn't actually have tissues—Nicke truly despairs of him at times, and it's lucky the little bastard is so endearing otherwise—but they both settle down in the living room, Nicke in the armchair with a roll of toilet paper, and Andre with the unicorn following him in, and doing its best to prod Andre to the couch.

"Stop it, I'm gonna sit where I want," Andre tells the unicorn, and it responds by poking him with its horn. "Ow!"

"Just sit down and see what happens," Nicke suggests, and when he does, the unicorn lets out a satisfied huff, and wanders away to sniff at the fake ficus plant that Michael Latta had given Andre when he'd moved in.

Andre watches it gloomily. "I'm totally going to lose my security deposit," he says. "It puts holes in things, and it's taken a shit in, like, every single room so far. I don't know how, because it's probably not eating enough, but it does."

"What do you do when it does?" Nicke asks.

Andre shrugs. "Clean it up. It disappears after a while, but until it does, it still smells weird. Like, all flowery, and stuff. Plus, the unicorn, like, it stares at me until I do. Or it pokes me. That's why I had to feed it."

Nicke makes a u-turn right back into that dangerous conversational lane. "What are you feeding it? And shouldn't you… not feed it?"

"I tried! It got mad, and it poked me, and then it ate all my apples. And my tortilla chips when I had nachos," Andre says. "They're made of corn," he adds defensively in response to whatever expression Nicke must have on his face. "Horses eat corn!"

"Start at the beginning," Nicke says. "When did it show up? And where?"

"No, first, you tell me what you meant about being allergic to magic," Andre says, crossing his arms over his chest. "And second, tell me how come you never said anything about that before."

"Same reason you probably didn't call anyone to say, _'Hey, there's a unicorn in my apartment_,'" Nicke counters. "It sounds ridiculous out loud, and you look crazy. People don't believe in it. Imagine how well it would go if I told everyone I start sneezing around pollen, leaf mold, and oh yeah, also magic. Not just in the NHL, but around people in general."

"But, I mean, if magic is real, then you know what to do about this, right?" Andre asks hopefully. "Do you have a wand? Can you make the unicorn go away? And, also, like, is Harry Potter real?"

"No," Nicke says.

"Which part?" Andre asks.

"All of it," Nicke says, pinching the top of his nose between two fingers, and sighs. "I don't know how to do magic, I just know it exists. When I get close to it, I can feel it, it makes my sinuses act up and I sneeze, obviously. To me, it has a funny smell. That was what I noticed on you in the locker room the other day."

"What magic do you know about?" Andre asks. "Like, what magic is there that made you get all, you know, with your allergies?"

Nicke hesitates, then decides with a unicorn in the corner of the room trying to gnaw on a plastic plant, nothing is really too weird to admit to right now. "Uh. Well. Holtby. His hat, I mean."

"_Holts_ is magic?" Andre says, eyes big and round with delight.

"His stupid hat is," Nicke says. "Have you noticed he's never lost it, even though it goes to every city with him? Like, he's accidentally left it a bunch of places also, and it always comes back to him."

And it looks better on him than it has any right to, but Nicke figures that goes without saying.

"I mean, he loves that hat," Andre says. "And maybe he's just lucky."

"No, it's. Well, yes, also. Magic is hard to explain," Nicke said. "Like, I barely can. Some of it's, like… think of it as some fancy science, like quantum physics or whatever. I know it's there, and it exists, and some people are way better at doing it or explaining it. There's rules for it, but we don't know all of them. So, I think sometimes things that seem lucky or like coincidence are magic."

"But I mean, is the hat magic because Holts made it magic, or did he buy it from a magic store, or what?" Andre asks.

"Sometimes it's actual things," Nicke says. "I think, anyway. People can do spells on stuff. Maybe the hat was made normally and then someone cast a spell on it for… whatever reason. To make it lucky, to sell it, or just for fun." He speaks carefully, trying to articulate things that he's rarely been able or willing to discuss outside his own mind. "Or maybe someone made the hat normally, but the thread comes from a field of magic cotton. Like, the materials combined, and that made the hat magic."

Magic is highly complex and highly individualized and a lot more affected by luck and random chance than Nicke thinks anyone wants to admit, not that he's had much helpful instruction on that matter. Hell, it's more like hockey than he'd like to admit. He doesn't know all of what magic can and can't do, because apparently it varies so wildly. Or so he's told. He doesn't _know_. Nicke suspects he's gotten as far in his life as he has by now by not thinking about it too much.

"What if Holts is a wizard," Andre breathes. "Like, his beard! It would explain so much!"

Nicke can't lie, he's mulled that possibility over at more than once. Frankly, anyone as handsome as Holtby should probably be suspected of at least some sort of magical influence. And that's not even taking his hair into consideration.

But he shrugs. "Maybe, but I don't think he is. I think Holts probably bought the hat that way and didn't know it. He just knew he really liked it. And some people are more… sensitive to it. Like, I said, some people seem lucky or unlucky. I think they're just more or less sensitive to it than others are. Holts might sense it more. He's a goalie, who the hell knows with them."

Andre looks more than a little disappointed, but he nods. "What other magic?"

"Animals," Nicke says. "Or creatures, I guess. I've never seen a unicorn before," he says, before Andre can ask. "But I've seen other things. There was a brook horse I spotted, once. And I saw hounds that came from… somewhere else. They weren't like normal dogs."

They'd also been white, an unearthly white, similar to but not the same as the unicorn. It's been years since he's seen them, but he's never forgotten them, and how fast they'd run, and the sound of their yips and howling. Every year he takes a Valium before the dog calendar shoot, and sometimes it still leaves him twitchy for hours afterward.

"Are Ovi's sweatjeans magic pants?" Andre asks. "Is that how he scores goals? How do you know all this, anyway?"

"No, now we're going to get back to the unicorn," Nicke says. "When did you first see it? Where? And what's it been doing?"

As if it knows they're talking about it, the unicorn wanders back over, skirts behind the couch, and nibbles at Andre's hair. Andre swats at it without looking. "Right after the home opener," he says, moving his head back and forth, trying to avoid the unicorn. "I came home and it was in my bedroom. I almost had a heart attack."

"And then what?"

"Well, first I thought it was Willy doing a prank and I was pissed," Andre says. "So I went to go yell at him. And he was all, what the fuck, I didn't do anything like put a mini horse in your apartment, so I made him come upstairs, and it wasn't there. At all. I looked everywhere in the apartment. So then I looked stupid, and he said it was a stupid joke by _me_, and I told him he was being a dick for messing with me. And then he went back to his apartment, and then it somehow was in my _bathroom_, and I know I looked there before, so I tried to take a picture of it with my phone and it. Like. Wasn't there. In the picture. It just came out kinda blurry."

Nicke grunts and takes his phone out. "I believe you. But let me try." He aims it at Andre and the unicorn, taps the camera, and looks at the camera roll. There's nothing there except Andre and some light halos that could be supernatural in nature or could just be Nicke's failure to adjust his flash. Points to Andre for having some common sense, then, even if it didn't turn out.

"So, then I called him to come back upstairs and I said I was sorry and he came back, but he didn't see it. It was right here, and he didn't see it at all, and he asked me if I had a concussion or if I was being weird." Andre takes a deep breath. "Then I called Mackan and I did facetime with him, and I made sure the unicorn was near me, but he didn't see it either," Andre says. More points. "So. Then I locked the bathroom door and went to bed."

"You didn't call me?" Nicke asks.

Andre looks vaguely guilty. "I mean, I thought maybe I did have a concussion. I was hoping it would just go away on its own and be fine in the morning."

"What the _fuck_," Nicke says, leaning forward sharply. "Seriously? Why the fuck would you think hiding a concussion is a good idea, are you an idiot?"

"I mean, nothing hurt," Andre says, inching back incrementally on the couch and slowly moving the pillow up against his chest like a shield. "Except when it, you know, poked me with its horn. So, I thought it probably wasn't a _bad _concussion, and so it was… okay?"

"Okay," Nicke says as flatly as possible, and Andre flinches. From behind the couch, the unicorn thrusts its head over Andre's shoulder (narrowly missing impaling Andre's ear in the process) and Nicke could swear it's fucking glaring at him with those creepy black eyes. He glares right back at it.

Nicke breathes out hard through his nostrils and immediately regrets it; the smell of patchouli is still overwhelming. "All right," he says, after taking a few seconds to compose himself. "So it just showed up, and then it disappeared, and it showed up again. Willy couldn't see it, and neither could Mackan. Could Willy touch it? Obviously, you can."

"It wouldn't go close enough to him," Andre says. "And I couldn't make it do it. But, uh. I think, maybe. I think it can? Touch other people, even if they don't see it, I mean."

Nicke waits, and when nothing more seems forthcoming, he settles back against the couch. "Have you seen it happen?"

"Sorta." Andre fidgets on the couch. "So, like. Really, you don't feel… different right now?"

"I am talking to you about a unicorn appearing and disappearing in your apartment," Nicke says. "I'm not sure how this is normal."

"I mean about, uh. Me," Andre says.

"Well, I'm pissed at you for trying to hide what you thought was a concussion," Nicke says. "But no, not really."

"So you don't want to, like. Kiss me?" Andre says nervously, and immediately brings the pillow up to his chest and hugs it like a shield again.

Nicke blinks and stares. "No," he says. Then, because Andre still looks the next thing to terrified, stares at him some more and tries to imagine kissing him, what he would do. It feels uncomfortable at best, even in his imagination. "Definitely not."

"Okay," Andre says, and breathes out noisily. His fingers crimp and uncrimp the pillow's seam. "Okay."

"Did you want to kiss… me?" Nicke asks carefully. "Because you're young, and probably having a lot of confusing feelings, and it's very flattering but—"

"No!" Andre says. "But, um. Other people kinda have. Like… more than usual, I guess."

"How much is usual?" Nicke asks.

Andre just shrugs. After another long pause, he says directly to the pillow rather than to Nicke, "I think the unicorn is trying to get me laid. I think it's making people want to, uh, hook up with me." Pause. "But, like… not everyone. I think it's picky. Because it's also, like. Trying to stab people. Who touch me. And I never know which one I'm going to get. And it's getting kind of hard to deal with."

Nicke runs this through his mind a few times, struggles with the implications, and then confronts it anyway.

"You're getting simultaneously cockblocked and set up by a magical unicorn," he finally says, and then Nicke sighs and rubs at his temples because somehow Andre always, _always_ manages to zig where others zag.

"Is that normal?" Andre asks.

Nicke doesn't bother answering. He just gets out his phone again. "Call Tom, see if he's home, and tell him I want him to come up to your apartment but not until I say so," Nicke says, unlocking his screen.

"Who are you calling?" Andre asks, obediently getting out his phone.

"Extra help," Nicke says.

The unicorn ambles off from behind the couch towards the kitchen again and knocks a lamp off an end table in the process. Nicke sneezes, and then dials.

***

Years of constant up-close exposure have mostly desensitized Nicke to Ovi's wardrobe choices, but even he has a hard time not noticing that Ovi's rolled up to the loading dock at Andre's apartment complex looking more… Ovi than usual, in a gray jogging suit, black beanie, gold chains, flawlessly white and weirdly puffy sneakers with no socks—all extremely Russian and more than a little mobster-esque. It's a visual impression that Nicke is fairly sure Ovi exaggerates on purpose for his own reasons; he's never known anyone more aware of the images and expectations set on him, and he's been watching Ovi deliberately lean into it most of the time.

It's a different form of control that Nicke goes for. Ovi puts on a show to distract and misdirect; Nicke tries to just avoid it altogether. He respects (and sometimes, if he's honest, also resents) the fact Ovi somehow manages to take some of his trashiest looks around again full circle to being oddly attractive and fashionable, though his cheekbones tend to do at least 80% of the heavy lifting in those circumstances.

"Where's dead body?" Ovi asks, getting out of his car.

"What?" Nicke says, opening the door and motioning him through.

Ovi looks confused. "I thought we getting rid of body."

What the fuck. Nicke pulls up short, eyeing Ovi and wondering if he was worrying about the wrong person for concussions. "No. What? No."

"Okay, so," Ovi says, and shrugs. "No body. What happens?"

"Why did you think I wanted you to come get rid of a dead body?" Nicke asks and starts walking again. Ovi keeps up next to him, glancing around the building's hallway with interest.

"You asked," Ovi says, the _duh_ implicit in his voice.

"I never said anything about a dead body," Nicke says.

"Well, you say, Burky has problem, you ask about my backyard and privacy, you say you need a truck car, and you say come quick and come to loading dock." Ovi shrugs again and spreads his hands out, palm up. "I figure, sounds like we need move dead body. Plus, you using your Backy murder voice."

"I don't have a murder voice," Nicke says, annoyed. He presses the elevator button a little harder than necessary, and they get inside.

"Yes, you do," Ovi says. He points to Nicke. "You have murder voice right now."

"If I wanted to move a dead body, I would just do it myself," Nicke says. "I wouldn't need help."

"Sure, I know," Ovi says amiably. "But it's good with friends, right?"

Nicke makes a noncommittal noise but he catches himself smiling. He doesn't look at Ovi, but he can see Ovi's satisfied expression in the reflection of the elevator doors.

They ride in silence for the last few floors, until they get to Andre's floor. As they head down the hall, Nicke takes another look at Ovi, evaluating. "What else did you bring in your car since you thought we were—" he makes a hand gesture meant to convey _illicit corpse disposal_.

"Hockey gear bag, because sometimes you can get whole body in it. Garbage bags. Paper towels." Ovi looks up, brow wrinkled. "Um. Gloves. Duct tape. Money for bribe."

"How much money?" Nicke asks.

Ovi hums. "Enough."

"Who have you put in a hockey bag?" Nicke asks.

"Just Matty P," Ovi says. "No, wait. And Kuzma once. We were drunk," he says, smiling with a distant fondness, like he's looking back on some happy memory. 

"I see," Nicke says. By then they've reached Andre's door, and suddenly Nicke feels unsure. If he opens the door and brings Ovi in, and Ovi can't see the unicorn, everything going forward gets much more difficult. Not impossible, but definitely harder than it could be.

He coughs. "It's not… a body," he says, hand on the knob. "But there's something strange going on. And I need your help with it. So. Come on." Nicke knocks hard on the door. "Andre, let us in."

The door opens immediately; Andre must have been right there waiting.

"Nicke?" he says, and then sees Ovi as well. "Um. Hi, Ovi."

"Hi Burky," Ovi says, and then pushes his way inside. "Did you kill hooker, or—oh."

Silence. Nicke steps inside as well, and sees Ovi standing stock still, looking into Andre's living room area. The television mounted on the wall is on but muted, and the unicorn is still there. Ovi's looking right at it. Nicke can feel his own heart beating, every individual thump as he waits.

"What the fuck," Ovi says flatly.

Relief sweeps through him, and Nicke can see it on Andre's face as well.

"Okay, good," Nicke says. "You see it too."

"Is this joke?" Ovi asks, cocking his head and continuing to stare. The unicorn is staring back at him.

"No, it's magic," Andre says. "Nicke said so. Nicke's a wizard."

"I am not a wizard, I already told you that," Nicke says irritably. "Where's Willy? Tell him I say to come up now."

"Can I pet him?" Ovi asks, and he's already reaching out, not even waiting.

"It might stab you," Nicke warns. "It does that a lot, according to Andre."

The unicorn lets Ovi stroke its neck, though. Emboldened, Ovi moves his hand up and scratches it on the mane, and the unicorn makes a pleased whickering noise. It swings its head away when Ovi reaches towards its horn, but then crowds up against him again, ears flicking as it lets Ovi go back to scratching it on the neck and cooing at it in Russian babytalk. Nicke doesn't know whether to be pleased or annoyed that of course Ovi has the same ability to get along with unicorns as he does with basically anything that has four legs and a tail. Judging by his expression, Andre feels the same way.

"He got name?" Ovi asks, as Andre comes over and starts scratching the unicorn on the other side of its neck. The unicorn stretches its neck out, shuts its eyes tightly, and makes dreadful expressions that Nicke assumes are the unicorn equivalent of delight, since no one seems to be getting stabbed or kicked or bitten.

"I haven't named him yet," Andre says. "I was kinda freaking out over whether or not he really existed." He frowns. "Maybe it's a she? I dunno."

"You can look, you know—" Ovi gestures in a vaguely southern direction. "Just check and see for bits."

"It might kick me," Andre says, but he's already looking like he's ready to bend over and check. "If it's a boy unicorn, maybe I'll call him Charlie."

Someone knocks on the door, fortunately delaying a debate between Ovi and Andre over the relative existence or identifying factors of unicorn genitalia.

"We can decide later," Nicke says. "That's probably Willy. Ovi, let him in. I want to see if he can see it, or if the unicorn disappears or what."

Ovi frowns. "Why not Willy won't see it?"

"He didn't see it before," Andre says.

"When was before?" Ovi asks.

"Like, after the home opener," Andre says. "That's when the unicorn showed up."

"You have a pet unicorn that long and don't say anything about it to team?" Ovi says, looking hurt.

"He thought he had a concussion and didn't want to tell anyone," Nicke says.

Andre gives him a betrayed look as Ovi says, "You thought you have concussion and you decide to _hide it_ for_ weeks_?" and goes from laidback to wrathful in about .5 seconds. On the Ovi annoyance scale, it's maybe somewhere between a Don Cherry Coaches Corner goal celebration rant and Tim Peel deciding to redefine what an interference penalty is in the last five minutes of a one goal game, but it's gratifying to Nicke to have someone else justify his own initial reaction to that bit of news.

Andre is doing his best to hide behind the unicorn now and keep it as a barrier between Ovi and him. "It wasn't weeks! It's, like, barely a couple weeks! I didn't even have a concussion!"

Ovi's still glowering, and also doing his best at reaching over and actually prodding Andre's head for concussion signs. Someone knocks on the door again. "Hey, uh, you guys going to let me in?" Willy's voice says through the door, muffled. "Kinda sounds like you're having a party without me."

"Why don't Willy just pet it?" Ovi asks shortly, gesturing at the unicorn.

"It disappeared when he was here," Andre says in a tiny voice. "Or was invisible."

Ovi glances over at Nicke and gives him a distinctly disgruntled _Okay what is this bullshit? _look. Nicke responds with his best _Just go with it we will talk later_ look, which Ovi accepts before grunting and stomping out of the room and to the door, with his face still set in the expression that makes most NHL defensemen shit themselves when they see it bearing down on them. Willy probably just caught the brunt of it, unfortunately. Nicke can hear them talking in the hall.

"Oh. Hi, O. Uh, I was joking. I can come back later," Willy says.

"No, come in," Ovi says, and returns to the living room with Willy in tow. "Here's Willy."

"Here I am," Willy agrees, uncertainly. He looks around the room. "What's up?"

Nicke glances over at the unicorn, to make sure it's still there. It is, and it's staring at Willy, gone very still. It flares its nostrils a few times, huffing. Nicke estimates the distance between it and Willy, and he thinks he can get in the way in time, but—Andre is still standing next to it, and he sees Andre tighten his fingers in its mane. This is a risk he probably should have attributed more danger to, and if it blows up in his face… after all, they just got Willy _back_ from suspension, and he has no idea how he's going to explain a potential stabbing by unicorn as a reason Willy needs to go to LTIR.

No one says anything, and Willy shifts from foot to foot. "Everything good?"

"You think everything good?" Ovi asks. He's looking at Willy too, flicking his eyes back and forth between Willy and the unicorn.

"I guess?" Willy says. He looks confused. "Did you need me for something? Is that why Backy told Burky to tell me to come up? Is this something… like for the team?"

"You don't see it?" Andre asks. He looks at Nicke. "See? I told you he couldn't see it."

"See what?" Willy says.

"It's right here," Ovi says, and points to the unicorn. "You really don't see it?"

"Is this an intervention?" Willy asks. He looks around. "Is the rest of the team here?"

"Why would we give you an intervention?" Nicke asks, and then decides he doesn't really want to know right now if Willy's done something that he thinks is intervention-worthy. "No. Look at me. Tell me honest, if there is any living creature other than me, Ovi, and Andre in the room right now."

"Wait, what? Did Burky get a dog?" Willy asks. "Did he say that I said he should do it? Because I didn't, I swear. Burky, shit, I _told _you not to get a dog without thinking it through, dude."

"I didn't get a dog, asshole," Andre says. "Anyway, I already have a dog back home."

Willy flaps his hand at the room. "So, are we having a really tiny party, then? Or did you get something from Ikea that collapsed, so you called Backy again?"

"_Two times_," Andre says. "That's only happened two times. Three, maybe."

"Yeah, three times in the past month," Willy says, and walks over towards Burky, pointing at his media stand. "I was there, you were, like, _'Nicky, Nicky, the Hemnes is broken, I have to take it back, Tom, oh my God, Tom, you gotta take it back for me so the returns people won't recognize me again and make fun of me, ahhhhh'_."

"It was broken because _you_ spilled the bag with the little dowel pegs and let them roll all over the place and get lost," Andre says heatedly.

Ovi is watching them bicker without saying anything, and Nicke can see the wheels turning in his head. Meanwhile, either Willy is a much better actor than he's ever been given credit for, or he really doesn't see the unicorn. Ovi can, and Nicke can, and Nicke is beginning to have the start of a theory on that stirring in the back of his mind. But they still haven't tried to see what happens if Willy touches the unicorn, when Willy slings an arm round Andre's shoulders and goes in for a combination noogie/hair ruffle. Nicke has maybe two seconds of warning before he sees a flash of movement from the unicorn. Without thinking, he throws himself towards the two of them, tackling Willy towards the couch and hoping he's not about to accidentally injure Willy instead of saving him from being stabbed, or get stabbed himself. Or break the couch.

Fortunately, Willy is remarkably sturdy, and Nicke is in fact the one who put together Andre's Kivik sectional, so it only creaks loudly in protest when their combined weight hits it full force, and Andre is yelling and Ovi is yelling and Willy is yelling _right _in Nicke's ear, so it's a few seconds before the world resolves itself properly.

"Dude! Fuck! Dude!" Willy is just repeating over and over. Nicke rolls off him just in time to see the unicorn coming in for another attempt; he grabs Willy's arm and they keep rolling onto the floor. The unicorn misses Willy and gores a couch cushion instead.

Now they're stuck flailing on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, both of them trying to get up but too tangled with each other and without the room to navigate. There's a hot flaring pain above his hip where he thinks the unicorn (or possibly Willy) kicked him in the side. Andre is trying to get between them and the unicorn, waving his arms and shouting and trying to drive it away, but the unicorn lowers his head, and paws at the ground with one foot, snorting. It's angry as shit and it's going to do _something,_ and he's about to potentially get murdered by a unicorn. It feels very surreal. It rears up, and just as he's getting ready to cover his head with his arms and hope for the best—

There are moments where Nicke looks down the ice and time slows down and he simply knows how a play is going to develop; he can see three, four, five moves ahead and how it will end, and he knows exactly what he needs to do—which pass angle, which skating stride—to make it happen. The simplicity of these moments is what's always the same, the sense of absolute surety. These flashes of pure confidence and clarity only last for seconds but they feel so much longer in the moment, and he's always able to take in every detail with exquisite awareness.

They rarely happen when he's not playing hockey. In fact, he can think of only one or two times that it's occurred when he wasn't on the ice. But time stretches out before him now in a crystallized stream. He can see the individual hairs on the muzzle of the unicorn as it charges; he can see the tapering knife-tip of its horn; he can see its _eyelashes_. It's beautiful and otherworldly, almost lovely beyond comprehension; he has time to think of how odd it is that he can see the beauty in something so intent on doing harm to him. Brutal and beautiful.

And now he sees Ovi come running back out of the kitchen towards them, and he watches and distantly marvels at the graceful arc of Ovi's arms and shoulders as he hurls a frying pan directly at the unicorn.

The unicorn _shriek_s out a noise that hurts Nicke's ears, something between a roar and a squeal that seems outsized for its frame. It dodges the pan, leaping up and over Nicke and Willy to land on the other side of the couch. It rears up once more, but then shies away, hooves clattering along the perimeter of the room. The frying pan hits the center of Andre's television dead on; the screen shatters and chunks of it fall to the floor; sparks fly, and then the top half of the screen and frame breaks away and falls from the wall mount but doesn't detach completely, dangling on its wires.

There's a breathless pause while they all watch it sway. Nicke sneezes. And then the television detaches completely and falls to the floor with a crunch.

Ovi points at it and looks contrite. "Sorry. I pay for that."

"My lease contract is so fucked," Andre says sadly.

"Seriously, _what the hell,"_ Willy says, from beneath him.

When they've all gotten back to their feet, the unicorn has disappeared into thin air again, because of course it fucking has.

While Andre is fielding a phone call from the property manager about the three different noise complaints he just got about Andre's apartment and earnestly telling them that he and his teammates accidentally got too excited about a game they were watching on television, and Willy's been convinced to at least hear them out and not actively flee from the three of them, Nicke goes over and finds the pan amidst the shattered pieces of the television. It's a cast iron skillet, a big one. When he hefts it, he figures it must weigh at least ten pounds, maybe more.

"I _know_ it sound stupid, but it's not joke," Ovi is saying to Willy. "Like, you think all three of us get concussion and see unicorn?"

"You don't have to tell me if you're on drugs, and you probably shouldn't tell me if you are, but, like,_ are_ you on drugs?" Willy asks.

"We promise, we'll be more quiet in the future," Andre says into the phone, "Oh, um, also we broke the TV. We're really sorry, we'll buy a new one. But we might need the super to come and check the wiring. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Bye."

"Iron," Nicke says. The other three all look over at him.

Nicke lifts the skillet up and brings it over. "It's iron. That's why the unicorn ran off. Magic doesn't like iron."

"Really? I'm genius," Ovi says. "Ha."

"You didn't actually hit it though. Just my TV," Andre says. He makes a face. "I know the unicorn just tried to stab Willy, and also, like, a bunch of other people but I don't want you to hurt it too bad. Ugh. Is that magic? Am I under a spell?"

Willy is looking around the room, probably for the closest escape path. Nicke hands the skillet to Andre and taps Willy's shoulder. "I know you don't believe us," Nicke says.

"You want me to trust you that Burky has an invisible unicorn friend that's been going around stabbing people and you knocking me on my ass right now and Ovi throwing a frying pan through Burky's TV was you guys saving me from being stabbed by said invisible unicorn," Willy says. "Apparently because I bad-touched Burky, or something."

"…Okay, that does sound pretty dumb," Andre says. "But it's true. Look at the hole in the couch cushion. That's from the horn."

"That could have been there before and I didn't notice," Willy says, but then he rubs the back of his neck. "Look, okay, I don't necessarily think you guys are crazy. But this is weird as shit."

"Yes, I know," Nicke says. He scrubs his hand over his face, trying to think of something, anything that would be helpful to proving they're not crazy.

Willy sighs. "Look, we can figure this out. Backy and O, you guys, can you just like, sit on the couch for a sec? Across the room, where I can see you? So I can tell there's no tricks?"

Ovi looks at Nicke. Nicke shrugs, nods, walks across the room, and sits down. Ovi takes the skillet from Andre, follows him, and plops down next to Nicke. He props the skillet up on his lap.

"Burky, just c'mere," Willy says. "Look. I'm gonna put my hand on your shoulder and if a unicorn stabs me? Okay, I believe you. If I don't get stabbed? Maybe we need to, like, consider that… I don't even know. That there isn't a unicorn, I guess."

Andre looks reluctant and Nicke can't blame him, but at this point it's not like he has any better ideas.

"Promise you'll move away if I tell you," Andre says as he moves towards but still just out of reach of Willy. He wraps his arms tightly around himself, keeping himself away. "Seriously."

"Fine, sure," Willy says. "Okay, I'm touching you. I'm putting my hand on you now." He reaches out and slowly rests it on Andre. Andre flinches, which makes Willy flinch in turn, but he just flexes his fingers slowly, clasping Andre's shoulder. "See?" Willy says, after a long pause. "Nothing. I'm okay. You're okay."

"It doesn't always happen," Andre says, but Nicke can see him relaxing just a little. It occurs to Nicke that he hasn't seen Andre hugging _anyone_ for the past few weeks either, and that alone should have tipped him off that something was terribly wrong. "I just don't want you to get hurt. I don't want any of you to get hurt."

"Don't be a dumbass, Burky," Willy says. "You gotta stop worrying about shit, you know how you get. Besides, I'm tough. Come on, bring it in."

He pulls Andre in by the shoulders and gives him a bearhug; Andre barely hesitates before hugging back. It's a beautiful moment until—

Willy shrieks, jerks back, and jumps practically a foot in the air, while clapping one hand to his ass. "OW, motherfucker!"

"He came back!" Andre says, and then the unicorn is there again, clip-clopping around Willy and crowding against Andre's hip, like a dog looking for petting. Willy jumps again as he clearly feels it slip by, and he looks around wildly, but he still doesn't seem to see it

"Something bit me!" Willy says. He keeps looking around, turning in place before he puts his back against the wall and holds his arms out in front of him, feeling hesitantly around in the air. "Or poked me."

"It was the unicorn, he's over here with me," Andre says, scritching the unicorn with both hands. "Good boy. Willy's my friend. You can't stab him, okay? Poking is okay, but no stabbing."

"Poking is not fucking okay!" Willy says. He rubs his ass through his jeans and checks the palm of his hand. "I think that broke skin."

Nicke thinks of what it's going to take to calm Willy down, and he decides it's time for some judicious fudging of the truth to make life easier. He nudges Ovi in the side and gets up, heading over to Willy and Andre. Nicke keeps an eye on the unicorn in case it decides to get overly aggressive again, but it seems fine just letting Andre fuss over it. He angles himself between it and Willy anyway, and he nods in quick acknowledgment when Ovi discreetly passes him the skillet.

"Tom, I know it seems crazy but it's almost exactly like—" he manages to say it without too much of a grimace—"Harry Potter," he says, and steps hard on Andre's foot as soon as Andre opens his mouth until Andre shuts up again. "You read those books, right?"

Willy frowns, but now he looks a little less horrified and a little more intrigued. "Uh, yeah."

"Magic is real," Nicke says. "We're not really supposed to talk about it, but it is. Sorry for just now, but there's something going on and we need you to trust us that it is there and you just… can't see it right now."

Willy takes a deep breath and looks over at Ovi. "You solemnly swear this isn't some weird joke?"

"What Backy says," Ovi says. "Besides, we ever lie to you?"

"You told me the minimum amount for money on the board was five thousand bucks in my first game," Willy says. "And that Grabo didn't speak English so I had to say anything to him really loud to make sure he could understand, and that Snarls was really allergic to Gatorade so if I drank any near him it could make him have an attack, and—"

"About anything important," Ovi says.

"Fine. Okay." Willy bites his lip. "So, can you wingardium leviosa anything in here?" he asks hopefully.

"No," Nicke says. "But after we throw away the TV, we're going to get Andre and a unicorn into an SUV and drive them down 495 to Ovi's house. That's way more impressive."

"Wait, what?" Ovi says.

The unicorn suddenly shakes Andre off it. It strolls to the center of the room, lifts its tail, and—

"Oh, gross," Andre says. "Stop _doing_ that."

"Hey, does anyone else smell something weird in here? Like, all floral and shit?" Willy asks.

Nicke rather suspects Ovi's corpse moving supplies are going to come in handier than he expected.

***

"Well," Nicke says a couple hours later, and then has nothing to follow it up with. "Well."

"It's… okay? I guess," Ovi says.

They're both on Ovi's deck, which overlooks his backyard, leaning on the rail. Andre is off gleefully figuring out which of Ovi's guest bedrooms to temporarily take over. Ovi dispatched Willy off on some errand, but he'll be returning soon. The unicorn is down on the backyard's lawn below, grazing peacefully. Ovi had reassured him that the fence and tree landscaping make his yard fairly private, though he couldn't guarantee complete security.

"Deer always getting in," he had said, and shrugged. "Maybe if neighbor sees, they just think it's, you know, white deer."

"Albino," Nicke had said.

"Or they think I buy a pony and keeping it in my backyard," Ovi had said. "I mean, I'm me, they probably think I do lots of weird things."

"If they can see it," Nicke had said.

"If they see it," Ovi had agreed.

The trees are losing their leaves now, though they're not completely bare yet. The grass is still green; the summer had taken a long time to fade into fall. There's enough space so that the unicorn can run about, if it has to. Ovi had been less uneasy about the whole housing Andre and his teleporting unicorn than he'd been at the idea the unicorn and his dog wouldn't get along, but after some initial sniffing by both, they'd settled for mutually ignoring each other.

"It's okay," Nicke says now.

Beneath them, the unicorn pauses while grazing, as it watches a bird swoop by over its head. Ovi, in response to Andre's report of the success of tortilla chips, had opened his pantry and given it a sample of just about every cereal he had on hand. Cornflakes, Corn Pops, and Honey Nut Cheerios had been a big hit— ("Oats!" Ovi had said like he was having a deep revelation, "Horses eat oats!" and Nicke had had to close his eyes and sigh deeply, then also remembered that that was the same box of Honey Nut Cheerios he was pretty sure Ovi had put his dick in) —though, it was indifferent to Rice Krispies and Frosted Mini-Wheats. He'd left his biggest mixing bowl full of cereal sitting on the patio stones, and the unicorn ambles closer to it.

The bird swoops by again, and then perches on the rim of the bowl, pecking at cereal. As Nicke watches, the unicorn lowers its head slightly, then tosses it. The suddenness of it makes the bird take off, but with an even quicker flash of motion, the unicorn fucking _snaps_ at the air lightning fast, with an almost snakey flick of its neck.

"Did it just...?" Ovi asks after a few seconds.

"I think so," Nicke says.

"Huh," Ovi says.

A feather hangs at a rakish angle out its mouth, and the unicorn lips at it thoughtfully, before going back to the lawn and drinking out of the birdbath.

Ovi has wrought-iron gates in the front, and there has to be some iron in the fence that goes around the back, so Nicke is hopeful that it'll keep the unicorn penned up safely and Andre can go about his business without being stalked so closely, but they'll have to test this later because the entire damn team is going to be descending on Ovi's house in a short amount of time. It's because of The Word.

There's a private team meeting at the start of every season where they do a couple necessary things. Someone (Nicke, usually) collects everyone's phone number and officially starts and sends a new groupchat on Whatsapp that they'll use throughout the season with everyone on the roster included. They run down the useful shit that the front office doesn't (or can't officially) give out, like the best clubs and bars to go to in order to pick up, the best places to drink or eat where no one will bother you, which beat reporters are trustworthy, what to do if Mia Khalifa DMs you, and other things. 

And someone (Ovi) picks The Word.

The Word is never to be used unless it's an emergency, and The Word is unquestionable. If The Word is invoked, it's an all-hands-on-deck team-only call to arms, and everyone is expected to respond and report, no matter what. They pick a new code word or phrase at the start of every season, and this year's phrase is "Surfer Bird", which was the result of about four different in-jokes colliding at once and also because it made Kuzy start giggling uncontrollably when he heard it, so it ended up as the choice.

Ovi Surfer Birded the team as soon as he and Nicke and Willy and Andre and the unicorn had gotten to his place. It's taking a little bit, because this late in the day, half the team is rearranging family plans or getting in from wherever they are at the moment, but Ovi promises dinner and Nicke goes out for a quick beer run, as well as picking up some allergy meds for himself.

By the time he gets back to Ovi's house, Willy's also just returned from whatever Ovi sent him off to fetch, and the unicorn has gotten bored of the backyard and wound up back inside the house, though no one actually saw it come back inside. When the doorbell rings, Nicke goes to answer it, expecting the first group of teammates.

"Hi," the Papa Johns delivery guy says. "I have, uh. Like twenty pizzas for delivery here? And… one side salad. Oh, hey, Ovi."

"Hi Jimmy!" Ovi yells from over the bannister, upstairs. "Be right down! Backy can show you where to put pizza in living room. I set it up."

Nicke lets Jimmy the pizza guy in, takes one of the delivery packs of pizza from him, and leads him cautiously into the living room, unsure of what Ovi means by setting up. Apparently, it means dragging nearly every chair in the house in the room, along with leaving several cast iron skillets, a fireplace poker, and a full set of goalie pads and helmet on the coffee table. There's also a whiteboard on an easel in the center of Ovi's living room that looks suspiciously like one of the team whiteboards from the Kettler locker rooms.

"Looks nice," Jimmy comments politely, as they try to find enough spaces to put the boxes down.

"Yeah," Nicke says, and directs them back to the kitchen, because there's no way it's happening on Ovi's limited coffee table space. And even if Andre is hiding in the basement and hopefully keeping the unicorn with him, he's uneasy about getting the delivery guy potentially stabbed or in the mood to jump Andre. Once all the pizzas are in from the car (along with a shit ton of chicken wings and garlic knots, and one last trip to bring in eight liters of Cocoa Cola with one of Diet Coke in what Nicke assumes is Ovi's additional contribution to trolling Brooks) Nicke rummages in his pocket for his wallet.

"Oh, it's okay, he paid in advance," Jimmy says. "He has a tab with us since he does promos, it's easier that way."

Nicke gives him a hundred bucks for a tip anyway because that was a lot of pizza to carry, signs the guy's hat and a spare takeout menu, ushers him out, and then shuts the door. He hears a noise and turns around to find the unicorn in the kitchen, up on its hind legs and trying to get into a box of sausage pepperoni pizza.

"Hey," he says, and then louder when the unicorn ignores him. "_Hey_."

The unicorn looks at him disdainfully, a piece of pizza already partially sticking out of its mouth. There's tomato sauce on its white muzzle. It's possible he's about to get stabbed, but Nicke decides some boundaries absolutely have to be set and slaps the unicorn's flank. "Bad unicorn. Stop that. Get down."

The unicorn makes an impatient whuffing noise, but it drops down on all fours again, hooves leaving some distinct damage on Ovi's kitchen floor. It looks up at Nicke, and Nicke swears it makes its eyes bigger and more pleading, never mind that the sauce on its muzzle makes it look like it was feasting on blood.

"Ovi fed you, like, a bag of carrots and three boxes of cereal an hour ago," Nicke tells the unicorn, unmoved. "Not to mention whatever Andre gave you. And you tried to stab Willy."

The unicorn tilts its head and whickers softly.

"Andre!" Nicke yells towards the basement. "Get up here and control your fucking unicorn."

A sound of steps galloping up the stairs, and Andre emerges looking anxious. The unicorn immediately goes over to start nuzzling at him and gets sauce on his shirt. "Sorry, I had to go to the bathroom," Andre says. "I closed the door because I couldn't do anything with it watching me, and when I came back, it was gone. Oh, pizza."

"I didn't hear it come up the basement steps," Nicke says, and eyes the unicorn suspiciously.

"It's doing that blipping thing again," Andre says. "Like, the first day I locked it in my bathroom and by the time I got down to the lobby, it was already there, waiting. And then it found me in the garage, but no one could see it there, either."

"Is it like a typical looking unicorn?" Willy asks, coming down from upstairs with Ovi trailing him. "Does it have gold hooves? Also, can you get me a couple hairs from its tail? I need them for… a thing."

"You get your Hogwarts letter someday, Willy," Ovi says, and then the doorbell rings. But before anyone can get to it, Kuzy and Snarls have just let themselves in without waiting for an invite, and are beelining for the pizza, with Devo, Vee, Bowey, Christian, Walker, and Chaser right on their heels.

Kuzy does a double take when he sees the unicorn and skids to a halt, yelling, "Sasha got a pony!" Snarls runs into him; Devo runs into Snarls, and then physics takes over and there's a pileup in Ovi's kitchen that would give any of the ones on I-66 a run for their money, with Kuzy at the bottom of it still yelling that he wants the first ride. As they're trying to get themselves sorted out, Brooks and Holtby and Grubi and a new wave of the team show up, confused by the noise. Ovi's dog rushes in barking its head off, and the unicorn takes the opportunity to make its move on another unguarded pizza, getting half of it off the counter entirely.

Grubi glances into Ovi's living room. "Are those _my _pads and helmet?" he asks.

And now it's time to really get this shitshow on the road.

The seating in Ovi's living room ends up divided by who can see the unicorn and who can't, with Nicke separating Andre and the unicorn out from everyone in an individual seat by the fireplace so that they don't need to worry about anyone getting stabbed just for touching him by mistake. Christian, Carly, Oshie, Kuzy, Snarls, Vee, Devo, Walker, Holtby, and Conno can all see the unicorn; everyone else doesn't see anything.

Ovi makes Willy write the names down in two columns on the whiteboard. Willy's added a couple of other bullet points to it, including **HARRY POTTER IS REAL, MAGIC EXISTS, PER BACKY. BACKY IS ALLERGIC.**

**UNICORN, SIZE OF VERY SMALL PONY, WHITE/SILVER COLOR, HORN (1). ACTS LIKE TOTAL DICK ESP WHEN SOMEONE TOUCHES BURKY. (DON'T BADTOUCH BURKY)**

**UNICORN CAN TELEPORT AND/OR BECOME (DEFAULT MAYBE??) INVISIBLE, APPARENTLY. WHAT THE FUCK.**

The non-seeing group is understandably skeptical, even when Willy drops his pants to show off the bruise on his ass where the unicorn jabbed him. Everyone wants Nicke to discuss magic, even when Nicke makes Willy put a line through the Harry Potter bit, but it's Grubi who proves the most unexpectedly helpful in this area.

"I believe you," he says. "Backy's right, magic exists."

"Grubi, are _you_ a wizard?" Andre asks.

"Durmstrang represent!" Willy yells.

Grubi ignores them both. "My cousin has a friend who has a magical realism camera," he says.

"That's not magic, that's just technology advancing," Conno says. "I tried the goggles once at the place up in Boston. You put them on, and it makes you think you're at the beach, or the Grand Canyon, or whatever."

"Not virtual reality," Grubi says. "It's an actual camera. She got it at some thrift store. When you use it, the photographs come out different than when you took the picture."

"Different how?" Conno asks.

"Well, she used it for a wedding shoot. And when she developed the pictures, in all of them the groom wasn't actually the groom. It was the groom's sister. Like, in the groom's place, wearing the tux, cutting the cake, and everything. Apparently the bride was in love with her instead," Grubi says, as calm as if he's discussing the weather. "My cousin's friend tried it out on some other people, and sometimes the pictures were the same, but in a lot of them, people were different. Like, they'd show exes, or dead relatives, or people were different ages, or whatever."

"That's nuts," Conno says.

"It's true," Grubi says. "She did research on it. She thinks she traced it back to one factory in Mexico. Fujifilm de México. All the cameras made during a one certain year have weird issues like that. Something to do with the glass in the lenses. They used a different supplier that year."

"Like Holts's hat!" Andre says.

"What about my hat?" Holtby says.

"They're really valuable if you can find them. People look for them in antique stores, and sometimes you see one pop up on the black market." Grubi grimaces. "There's one that apparently shows how you die if you take your picture with it. But it might just be a story. Anyway. I was at the wedding. I saw my cousin's friend take the pictures. They weren't fake."

"They could have been faked," Beags says. "People photoshop things all the time."

"Do you think your cousin's friend would lend us the camera?" Nicke asks. "That would be useful. Maybe it could actually take a picture of the unicorn that everyone could see."

"I can ask," Grubi says, shrugging. "No guarantees."

"Tell her we can pay to borrow it," Ovi says. "Anyway, since we don't have magic camera, we come up with way for the people who don't see unicorn to prove it's here."

"Seriously, what about my hat, though?" Holtby says,

"Ovi, if you Surfer Birded us for a prank this size, you're gonna have to put so much money on the board," Beags says.

"You can be first, Beags," Ovi says, and waves to the goalie gear. "You should get dressed."

"Why?" Beags asked.

"Because you gonna need it when unicorn tries to stab you," Ovi says sweetly.

It takes not only Beags, but also Brooks, Nisky, Chorns, and Eller getting padded up and trying to either touch the unicorn based on Andre's instructions on where it was standing, or try to hug Andre, and end up getting jabbed or nipped in various places by the unicorn before everyone's convinced. Ovi and Nicke stand by on hand, armed with skillets and the fire poker to scare the unicorn off if it gets too aggressive.

"Well," Brooks says, when everyone's settled down. "I guess we should think of this as inspirational adversity. Also, way to go, Burky, for your purity pledge, I guess."

Burky looks confused, lowering his piece of pizza. "My what?"

"Purity," Brooks says. "Virginity."

Burky drops the piece of pizza altogether. "I'm not a virgin!"' he says indignantly.

"Tell that to the unicorn trying to put its head in your lap," Brooks says, gesturing.

"He just wants my pizza. I already gave you some, knock it off," Burky says, shoving at the unicorn. "What's that supposed to mean, anyway?"

"In Harry Potter, the unicorns are supposed to prefer girls," Willy says. "I mean, maybe Burky's just more in touch with his feminine side."

"Burky, if you throw that beer bottle at Willy, I'm not gonna let you have more," Ovi says. "Don't mess my carpet. Willy, be nice to Burky or he's gonna let unicorn stab you and I'm not gonna save you with frying pan."

"Maidens, not girls," Brooks corrects. "And by that, virgins. Unicorns are attracted to virgins."

"Batya, this is weird porn," Kuzy says. "I'm not sure you should talk about in front of rookies."

"I swear to God, I know _some_ of you guys went to college, and all of you had to at least take a few lit classes in high school," Brooks says. "Or went to an art museum."

"Not me," Ovi says cheerfully.

"All I know about unicorns is that I saw _The Last Unicorn_ movie when I was a kid and the bit with the tree that has the tits fucked me up for a while," Oshie says. "It was traumatizing."

"Oh fuck, is that the one with the unicorn in the swamp, like, and it gets depressed and drowns and the kid is crying about it?" Nisky asks. "Because that one fucked _me _up. It gave me nightmares."

"That's not a unicorn, that was a regular horse," Brooks says. "And that was _The Neverending Story_**,** different movie. Also traumatizing, though."

Holtby raises his hand. "We're coming back to my hat, by the way, but Grubi and I went to the museum in New York on that off day we had between there and Buffalo, and we saw those famous tapestries that have the unicorn in them, so I guess I kinda know what Brooks is talking about."

Grubi nods. "And there's Dürer. And Schongauer."

"Yeah, them too, sure," Holtby says. "Anyway, so there are these famous medieval tapestries that are all about how these guys trap and hunt a unicorn."

"Using a virgin," Brooks says. "Apparently you get one to go sit in the woods, a unicorn comes and lays its head in her lap, and then, wham, you've got a unicorn. Also, apparently unicorns can be a stand in for Jesus. Or Mary. I'd have to look it up. That's why unicorns and virgins go together."

Willy adds **VIRGINS???** to the whiteboard, and then draws a dick and a frowny face next to it.

"Virginity is an outdated social construct that society has made up to commodify bodies and create an unrealistic and contradictory standard for male and female sexual expression," Holtby says, and then shrugs when everyone looks at him again. "Brandi's pretty hardcore about it. She's right, anyway."

"Anyway, I feel like there are a couple questions here," Brooks says. "Even if we take Burky's word that he's not a virgin—"

"I'm not," Burky says. "I had sex with—" he counts on his fingers—"at least three, no, four people before training camp even started this summer. Girls. Four girls."

"None of us care who you sleep with," Nicke says. "Boys or girls."

"Yeah, no judgement here," Holtby says, and gives the room at large a quick, hard stare to back it up.

"Okay, then... actually, um, seven people," Andre says, and blushes.

"Yeah, but have you had, like, the right kind of sex?" Willy asks. "Maybe you're doing something wrong."

Andre glares at him. "Fuck off."

"What's the right sex?" Holtby asks. "Sex is sex."

"I dunno, whatever Burky hasn't done yet. Like, maybe it needs to be more hardcore. Like, involve the butt, or nipple clamps, or something," Willy says.

"_As I was saying_," Brooks says. "Obviously some of us can also see it, and Osh and Carly and Kuzy all have kids, so we know they're not virgins. So, why are_ some_ of us seeing unicorns—"

"There's only one unicorn," Ovi says. Brooks ignores him and pushes on doggedly.

"And why are others of us _not _seeing them," Brooks finishes.

"I know why," Nicke says. Everyone focuses on him.

"Because you're a wizard," Andre says. "I_ knew_ it."

"Because the only thing that everyone who can see the unicorn has in common is we all drank that stupid unicorn millkshake drink that Willy got for Andre a couple weeks ago," Nicke says. "I'm pretty sure."

Everyone looks at him with varying degrees of dawning comprehension and memory. "That's true," Carly says. "You and Ovi had it, Burky had it, Snarls passed it to me after Kuzy had it… okay is there anyone here who drank it and doesn't see the unicorn, or vice versa?"

Everyone then looks at each other until Brooks slams his hand down on the coffee table triumphantly.

"_Ha._ That'll teach you to put that processed shit in your bodies," he says.

"I don't care, I like seeing unicorn," Kuzy says. "Though maybe not if he murders people who hug Burky."

"Yeah, Kuzy's got a point. This is cool and all, but what're we gonna do with Murdercorn here," Willy says.

"You can't name my unicorn, I get to name my unicorn, it's _mine_," Andre protests. "Also this is all your fault for the drink."

"You didn't even want it before though," Willy says. "You said you kept trying to lock it in the bathroom."

"That doesn't matter, it's still mine," Andre says. "So, I should get to name it, not you. I was going to call him Charlie."

"But Murdercorn sounds cool," Carly says. "Like. Especially if you roll the r. _Murrrrrrrdercorn_."

"That does sound cool," Andre admits. "_Murrrrrrrdercorn."_

"_Murderrrrrrrcorn_," Willy tries, stressing a different syllable.

"Or, like, _murdercorrrrrrrrn_," Oshie says.

"_Murrrrrderrrrrrcorrrrrrn_."

"I will murder everyone here," Nicke says calmly.

"You mean murrrrrrrder everyone here," Carly says, but he scooches his chair back to be out of Nicke's immediate reach.

"So, maybe we don't need magic camera," Ovi says. "Maybe we just need whole team to drink unicorn drink, and then they see it. Who wants to do Starbucks run?"

"Dude, I'm pretty sure they don't sell them anymore," Oshie says. "I told you guys, they only ran for like a little while in the spring."

"Maybe they're on the secret menu?" Walker says. "Sometimes you can get stuff that way."

"I don't think it will work," Nicke says. "But if Starbucks is willing to sell us about twenty unicorn drinks, we can try."

"Why can't Burky keep it for pet?" Kuzy asks. "It's nice."

"Yeah, you say that, but it hasn't tried to stab _you_," Willy says.

"Besides, I mean, it's hard enough to have a regular pet like a dog or a cat during the season," Oshie says. "Like, being on the road? If my wife didn't handle it, I couldn't do it. They're a lot of work."

"Well, if you get a cat, it's not bad, it's like small dog, you know? Or if you get a lizard, they kinda like cats, but lizard," Ovi says.

There's a brief silence in response to that.

"Did that make sense to anyone but O just now?" Carly says. "Like, there were words I understand there, but I don't know how they work together."

Ovi shrugs, undaunted. "So, unicorn kinda like big dog, maybe, and besides, unicorn follows Burky around. Maybe it comes on the road with him. Tell the players from other team to hug Burky and then, blargh, murdercorn stabs them. We win."

Beags looks around the room. "Uh, I realize this might come off kinda brutal, but if it's causing so much trouble, is there any reason we can't we just fucking shoot it? Like, with a gun?"

Another appalled silence, longer this time. Andre gapes at him and puts his arm over the unicorn's back protectively. "We can't kill it! That's wrong!"

Vee raises his hand. "Where we get silver bullets?" he asks, looking concerned.

"That's werewolves, Vee," Carly says, and elbows him lightly. "Anyway, Beags, I love you and your drive, but we can't go, like, straight to murder on this one. It just doesn't feel right. It's too cute. Look it in the eye and tell me if you could shoot it in cold blood."

"Yeah, I'm looking the invisible unicorn I can't see right in the eye. Anyway, apparently it's_ stabbing_ people," Beags says. "That seems like kind of an issue that might require shooting."

"Dude, we seriously can't kill a unicorn," Willy says. "Haven't you ever read Harry Potter? We'd all end up cursed as shit."

"We're not going to drink its _blood_," Beags says. "Just kill it."

"Ha, I knew you read the books," Carly says. "Nerd."

"Yeah, I borrowed them off you, asshole," Beags says. "Nisky, back me up about this. Tell Burky about it."

"His name is _Charlie_," Andre says. "Not it."

"Burky, he's kinda got a point. Don't name the murdercorn and get attached; it'll just be harder to kill it later," Nisky says.

"We're not gonna kill it!" Andre says. The unicorn snorts, and everyone freezes up for a second, waiting to see what happens next, but all the unicorn does is start eating the mushrooms Devo picked off his pizza. Devo pulls a few more off another slice and holds them out hesitantly, and the unicorn delicately eats them off his palm, and then licks him.

"Yeah, I don’t think we should kill it," Devo says., and gently scratches under its chin. "You're really a good boy, right? Yeah, you are."

"Fine. Whatever. No shooting the invisible stabbing murdercorn," Beags says. "I just want it on record that I advocated for the sensible solution."

"I mean, if it hasn't murdered anyone_ yet_, it's technically not a murdercorn," Walker says, and the room devolves into general bickering again.

In the midst of it, Ovi leans in next to Nicke. "How come you don’t think drink will work?" he asks quietly.

Nicke bites his lip. "It might but I don't think so," he says quietly back. "It's probably something to do with whatever stuff went into that one drink, or whoever it was that made it. Otherwise, we'd probably hear more on the news about everyone seeing unicorns."

"So, either a witch or wizard makes it, or maybe someone use crazy enchanted cow milk for it, and that's why," Ovi says. "Okay."

"See, I don't know why you pretend to be stupid," Nicke says. "You're smart enough to figure things out."

"I don’t pretend anything, Backy, who says that," Ovi says with a straight face, and then smiles. "So, what about other people? Unicorn keep stabbing everyone, but no one here tries to jump on Burky and kiss him like he says other people try."

"I don't know," Nicke says. "Maybe we should list who's doing that too."

"You talk to Burky, find out who does that," Ovi says. "Okay!" he says loudly, clapping his hands together. "We got plan. First we gonna try getting unicorn drink. Who's got most, least rookie points?"

Willy still has the least points, but since his coffee run is what probably got them into this mess, he stays at the house. Ovi dispatches Christian, Vee, and Walker to the closest Starbucks for unicorn drinks, telling them to pretend ignorance of its limited run or failing that, to use bribes if necessary. "Just make Walks ask," he says. "Americans like his accent."

Meanwhile, half the team is trying to feed the unicorn various pizza toppings, Kuzy is still demanding a ride, even despite the unicorn's size, and the rest of the team is debating what to name the unicorn besides "Charlie" or "Murdercorn."

"Now," Ovi continues, turning to the unicorn. "It's here and we not gonna kill it, so who knows how to take care of horse until we figure out how to make it go away?'

As one, the entire team turns and looks at Holtby.

"Whoa, hey, no," he says. "I did hockey to get _away_ from the farm. Besides, we mostly had cows."

"Well, what they eat, anyway?" Ovi asks. "This one likes pizza. And Honey Nut Cheerios."

"And chips," Andre adds.

"And pepperoni," Conno adds. "I didn't know horses ate meat."

"It's not a horse, it's a unicorn, so who knows. And no one's told me about what's going on with my hat," Holtby says. "Don't think I've forgotten that."

"Ask Nicke," Andre says, and then his phone pings. "Nicke, Christian says that the Starbucks won't sell them any unicorn drinks, because they don't keep all the ingredients around for it anymore."

"I figured," Nicke says. "Just tell them to come back. Maybe we can get Grubi's friend's camera. But I think we need to just go back to the Starbucks in the airport and talk to whoever made the drink for Willy that day."

Hopefully she still works there. Hopefully that's the real cause of this. Hopefully they can resolve this quickly and painlessly and get Andre back to normal, so they can focus on winning the goddamn Cup and Nicke can go back to forgetting that magic exists and is an enormous pain in his ass.

He looks around the room. Grubi is pulling up info on his phone of some famous German artist who painted unicorns and trying to show them to Nisky. Oshie has gone into the corner to facetime with his wife while she's putting his kids to bed. Beags and Carly are restarting the Kool Aid Man argument from the groupchat again. Brooks is muttering and already making some kind of ominous list on the back of a pizza box with a sharpie. It's chaos, but it’s comforting in its way; they're all united behind one cause, impossibly weird as fuck as it is.

"Seriously, isn't anyone going to explain what's going on with my hat?" Holtby says plaintively.

***

Between the off day and with all the weird shit that's been happening, it feels like a relief to get back to practice and the routines of actual hockey. But as it turns out, having an unpredictably invisible unicorn traipsing around the locker room and occasionally jabbing people in the ass with its horn during their yoga session is an undeniable distraction. Not to mention how four teenage girls, two guys from a beer league practice, and one concession stand worker from the snack bar next to the Kettler team store had all done their best to waylay Andre on the way into practice, to a degree that even the usual fan with a flexible interpretation of personal space boundaries didn't try.

Nicke could see how Andre had ended up as completely on edge as he'd been. If you weren't sure whether someone approaching you was going to suddenly try to grab your ass and stick their tongue in your mouth, or shriek bloody murder about being stabbed by an invisible knife, he'd probably have been doing pretty poorly as well.

"I thought the fence was supposed to keep it at Ovi's house," Brooks says, frowning and looking around. Everyone in the weight room is twitchier than usual, and anyone who can't see the damn thing has gradually moved out of the center of the room and closer to the walls, in order to leave less unprotected areas of the body vulnerable.

"I hoped it would," Nicke says. "I don't know. Maybe someone opened the gate at Ovi's house, and it went out then. Or maybe it can just jump over it. Or maybe it really does just teleport."

"I looked up some more stuff last night," Brooks says. "Believe it or not, Erin took a course on medieval art back in college for one of her required classes. That's how I heard about the whole virgin thing. She kept a whole bunch of her textbooks from it, and I just, you know, leafed through."

"Yeah?" Nicke asks.

"Yeah. Plus, I hit up Barnes and Noble. You wouldn't believe what you can find in the New Age section." He makes a face. "I made a list. We can try some other things. There's all this different stuff that's supposed to protect you from fairies or witches or some shit."

At some level, Nicke is always aware of the fact Mac brought in Brooks for a fundamentally unflattering reason. They can call it culture change all they want; at the heart of it, it means he and Ovi and the rest weren't getting it whatever needed to be done, done. That knowledge of being found wanting had been there in the beginning like an itch, but he can ignore it now, because no matter what they say about his playing, Brooks as a person is reassuringly solid in a way it feels like they hadn't had since Mike Knuble, like bullshit just won't stick to him. He takes his role as a team leader seriously, even if he's prone to occasional bouts of gluten-related lectures. And there's even a really good sense of humor there, that Nicke never would have believed him capable of having back when he was just another Pen.

"Is it still in here?" Brooks asks, looking around the room again.

Nicke shakes his head. "Andre was going to try and lock it in the showers."

The unicorn doesn't want to stay locked in the showers as it turns out, even though Ovi had stopped at Safeway on the way over and bought out practically their whole stock of Lucky Charms for it to eat as a distraction, and also for anyone else who wanted some. (Brooks had sighed heavily.)

At least it doesn't seem to like or just can't figure out how to get onto the ice, so that's a relief. White wins the shootout drill against Red, and the bottom six all start whooping; Beags grabs Andre for a hug without thinking, and there's an uneasy pause but nothing happens. And once Andre figures out that he's not going to get anyone stabbed as long as he's on the ice, he goes around shamelessly demanding high fives and hugs from every single teammate just to make sure, and sometimes doublechecking.

"Burky gonna mess with reporters," Ovi says, casually skating by Nicke. "They don't know which goalie gonna start because Burky won't let Holts off ice."

Andre is indeed on his third or fourth hug from Holtby, and he looks like he's planning to hang out on the ice with the scratches for their last part of practice, prolonging his cuddle session. He looks happier and more relaxed than Nicke's seen him in a while, and once he finally lets Holtby go, he just makes a beeline over to Chorns and starts messing with him.

"Eh," Nicke says. "Trotzy won't tell them who gets the net anyway."

Ovi chuckles and then heads off ice; Nicke takes a few more seconds to watch, and then he's off to hit the showers as well. He dawdles on purpose when he's done, watching Ovi hold the usual court with the media, and keeps an eye out for Andre, who hasn't showed up yet.

"He's hanging out in the stick room," Christian says, showing up just when Nicke is getting ready to check out on the practice rink again. "He thought, um, it might be weird for everyone if the unicorn was in there while everyone was showering, so he said he'd wait until everyone was done and then he'd go."

"Ah," Nicke says. He eyes Christian. "Are you waiting for him?"

Christian shrugs. "I was in the skate sharpening room." He looks out at the rink. "Why didn't it come onto the ice?"

Nicke's been thinking about that, though he's not sure. "I think it's either the ice or the skates," he says. "You know, the skate blades. They're steel. That has iron in it. And water sometimes stops magic things, they can't always get across it, though usually it has to be moving."

Christian nods, frowning a little. "But aren't there magic things that live in water? Like, um, mermaids? Or a _bäckahäst_. I read about those."

"I saw one of those, once," Nicke says. "And I don't know. I tried to tell Andre and Ovi that. Magic is weird. "

"Maybe it just can't walk gracefully on ice and it doesn't want to look stupid," Christian says seriously, and then smiles. Nicke can't help but smile back. Christian still treats him with such deference most of the time, that it's good to see him trying to break out of that.

"He's been different," Christian says, smile fading. "Like, I knew something was off and he wasn't touching anyone, but I didn't know why. So, it's good to know now that why that was." He looks at the ground. "I kinda, we thought maybe he'd want to come hang at the hotel with Vee and Bows and Stevie and me and play FIFA before the game, so he knows we're all still cool even if he has—" Christian waves his hands around vaguely. "—an issue. But he says he doesn't want the unicorn to mess anything up at the hotel."

"His apartment's still kind of destroyed right now, so it makes sense," Nicke says. "But Ovi doesn't mind him crashing at his place until we figure this out more."

"How come he's not staying with you?" Christian asks. "Like before."

"Because he stayed with me before and I know exactly what it's like," Nicke says dryly. And even if the fence doesn't work as well as he'd hoped, Ovi's house and yard is at least big enough to mostly handle the combined effects of Andre and a unicorn. And Ovi himself, who had DM'd Nicke a video last night of him and Andre on Ovi's deck, using golf clubs to hit apples out into Ovi's backyard, presumably for the unicorn but also possibly just for the hell of it. "Also, the unicorn seems to like Ovi the best, after Andre."

"It likes _you_," Christian says.

"It makes me sneeze," Nicke says.

"But it likes you," Christian says. "It didn't poke you at all when we were in the video session. Or during yoga."

"Did it poke you?" Nicke asks, but before Christian can answer, Andre finally appears, still on his skates. The unicorn isn't far behind him.

"Is the shower free?" he asks, running a hand through his curls.

"I think everyone's done," Christian says. "If you want, I can guard the door while you do it. Keep out all those people going crazy for you."

"Jealous much," Andre says cheerfully, and clomps off towards the locker room.

Christian looks at Nicke and shrugs once more. "I'll go wait. See you tonight."

"Be careful when you leave," Nicke says. "Have one of the staff bring his car to the private level. You can ask Rob to do it. There's probably fans who'd throw themselves at him anyway, even without the whole… whatever the unicorn is doing."

"Bows calls it the whammy," Christian says, and he flashes another quick smile and heads off after Andre. Nicke decides he's getting bonus rookie points from here on out.

It feels almost strange to be home by himself. They still need to visit the barista, see what they can figure out there, but it'll have to wait until when they're actually leaving for an away game and inside Dulles properly. They can't think of any non-suspicious way to get into the Starbucks that's in the post-security section of Dulles without having to either buy a random ticket or come up with some story to make the team let them go over through official channels, and Willy doesn't even know the name of the girl to begin with.

In his bedroom, Nicke checks his phone and knows it's going to cut into his nap, but then calls his parents in Sweden anyway.

His mother's surprise is audible, but he can hear the smile in her voice as well. "Nicke, I thought we would hear from you tomorrow. How's everything going?"

"It's… busy," he says. "Some of the younger players are having issues. Off ice, mostly. It's very…" He searches for an accurate word. "Dramatic. And weird. How are you?"

"And you're helping them?" she asks and laughs. "I'm fine."

"Your health is okay?" he asks, because he will have to ask and know, always.

They're coming up on the Cancer Awareness campaign month, and Sergey's already been talking to him about what he wants to be involved in, if he wants to film a promo or whatever. He still can't forget what it was like to sit down with his parents in his home, hollowed out after another playoff loss and getting ready to leave for the season's exit interviews. His mother's voice had been calm, steady, and her eyes were dry; his father was the one who had leaked tears during it. It had felt surreal, seeing his father cry; he couldn't remember the last time he had. Later, after everything was cleaned out and done, he'd sat in the car in the Kettler parking lot for twenty minutes, numb and unable to move before he could make himself start it and drive home. He hadn't told anyone.

It came out later, when she had recovered. Once her health had returned, he could acknowledge it and even speak briefly about it for the team's Hockey Fights Cancer campaign. Everyone had been fine about it, and he accepted everyone's good wishes, the relief at knowing it was a happy ending after all.

Last year was the first time he'd said anything else about it, and of course, it had ended up being Ovi. It was the end of the season, again, and it was because of fucking Pittsburgh, again, and they'd been sitting together, waiting for the individual interviews and he'd suddenly been so blindingly angry that it had just come out.

"They didn't tell me my mother had cancer until after we lost to New York in the second round," he'd said. "They didn't want to distract me, they said. They didn't tell me."

Ovi hadn't said anything at first, staring straight ahead with nothing but a widening pool of silence between them. Eventually he'd replied, "They don't tell me my dad have heart attack in Sochi. That he's in the hospital, have surgery. Not until after we lose game and get eliminated."

He'd taken a deep breath and then sighed, a noise that seemed to rise up from deep inside him. "Last year, he have another heart problem right before playoffs start, you know. I think, back then—this, I can't tell anyone, say to anyone, well, at least this time it happens right in front with me, they can't not tell me. I think it's bad but funny, and I laugh. I'm try not laughing when they put my dad in ambulance."

Silence, and then Ovi spoke again, sounding exhausted. "It's worse with love, sometimes."

"Yeah," was the only response Nicke had been able to say, because he'd understood, and he'd also known there weren't words for it. All the best and worst moments of life were always inarticulate.

But they'd gone on being quiet together after that, and it was a different quiet. Ovi had leaned against him a little, and then Nicke had gone for his interview, and when he came back, Ovi was in another room with Ted, and they hadn't spoken at all until coming back to DC the next season.

"I'm fine," his mother says gently, breaking him away from his memory. "Everything is good. I promise."

They talk of news from home and minor pleasantries after that; she tells him about what the neighbors have been up to and he confirms when they'll make the trip out for the holidays, and it's not until he's getting ready to hang up that he brings up what he's also been meaning to ask. "How is Granny?" he asks. "I was wondering about her."

His mother snorts. "Your father's mother is the same as always," she says. "She called him to complain after the game against Philadelphia."

"Ah," Nicklas says. Yes, that 8-2 shitshow. "I hope she went to bed before the end."

"She did," his mother says. "But she had a lot to comment on."

"I'll bet," he says. "Tell her I'm going to call her later and she needs to be nice to me."

"Don't get your hopes up," his mother says dryly. "You know how she is."

He hesitates. "If you talk to her, tell her I was thinking about that time we went on vacation in Höglunda and visited her, when Kristoffer and I were small. Tell her I was thinking about it a lot lately, because some recent things reminded me of it. Tell her I remember it well."

After a few more back and forth comments, he tells his mother he loves her and to keep taking care of herself, and then he hangs up. His nap isn't as easy to fall into as it normally is, but he practices breathing the way the sleep specialist Trotz made them all listen to had shown them, and he lies on his side with his eyes closed. He listens to the sound of his own breathing and the noises that filter in from outside. Once in a while, a dog barks in the distance.

They don't win that night. By the second period, they're down three to nothing and it's a special team nightmare, one penalty after another, and they've already given up two goals to the Florida powerplay in the first and the second without making any similar kind of result on their own powerplay. It's the bottom six that's gotten all their goals so far, and Ovi's line is struggling, with he and Kuzy out of sync on several of their passing plays and coverage.

Nicke's line is doing a little better, but they're still not on the scoreboard. Their only goal comes from Christian in the third, and soon after that, Andre's digging in the corner for a rebound and gets hooked on the left hand by McCoshen. Nicke can see the immediate pain and discomfort on his face after the play was whistled dead, taking off his glove and flexing his hand with his mouth a tight line of pain. He stays on the ice for his next shift, but Nicke can already tell it's not good; his own thumb aches almost in sympathy, remembering from when that piece of shit Letang broke it back in 2011.

They try and press with Grubi pulled and with the powerplay from the hook, but the puck goes down the ice, bang, into the empty net. Technically shorthanded, which makes it worse somehow. After the game, Andre's thumb is already swollen and the trainers don't look happy. They're going to evaluate it again tomorrow, but Nicke's willing to bet a month of salary that it's another freak hand injury, and who knows now if Andre's going to be coming with them on the upcoming road trip. The timing of this really couldn't be worse.

"Maybe the murdercorn can heal it?" Vee suggests after practice the next day. Burky didn't skate; he's sitting on the bench, morose as hell. "Like, with his horn?"

"Or it could stab his hand and make it worse," Beags says. "You gotta be careful."

"I mean, if it's trying so hard to get him laid or whatever, it probably won't stab him," Devo says. "I think it's worth a shot."

"Devo's right," Brooks says, who's become the reluctant expert on all things unicorn-mythology related. "Unicorn horn was supposed to have mystical healing powers as well as the ability to purify or negate poisons. Of course, most of those were based on the horn, like, not being on the unicorn."

Vee and Andre both look clueless, so Brooks elaborates. "Like, the horn was cut off the unicorn. You ate it or drank it, ground up into powder or chips or whatever. Or you used it in medicine. It was a real thing in the renaissance, plus there's definitely a link there to the eventual endangerment and poaching of the rhinoceros, as well as—"

"We can't cut off his horn," Andre says, interrupting him. "Then he'll really stab me. Plus, that's just mean."

"No one's saying cut off the horn," Brooks says. "Just see if it'll let you rub your hand on it or something. On the horn. You know what I meant, you little shits, stop giggling."

Everyone in the room looks over at Nicke, who the team has apparently decided is the second most expert person on unicorn behavior, even though Nicke thinks it should be Grubi. He shrugs. "Can't hurt. Might help."

The unicorn's in the weight room again—it seems to really like it there, maybe because there's a ton of mirrors—so Andre, Vee, Devo, Carly, Gravy, and Nisky troop over to try it out, with the idea that if it does work, maybe Nisky and Gravy can take advantage as well.

While they're off, Brooks sits down next to Ovi and Nicke. "We need to talk to whoever it was that sold Willy the Starbucks frappuccino," he says. It's amazing how much judgment he can impart to the word _frappuccino _just in the pronunciation. "I don't think we can wait for the roadtrip. Is there a way we can just go over and find this girl at the airport? Ovi?"

"I'm gonna end up on FBI watchlist," Ovi complains, but he gets out his phone and starts speaking Russian to someone. Nicke leaves him to it while he keeps talking to Brooks.

"I don't think we should all go," Brooks says. "That'd look too weird. Burky needs to go because the unicorn follows him everywhere. Definitely Willy too, since he's the one who knows which barista it is, and, well…"

"He was probably the one who was supposed to drink it in the first place," Nicke finishes.

"Yeah," Brooks says. "Probably you should lead the whole thing, since you've got the magic ID-ing skills, God knows I wouldn't trust Burky and Willy on their own. Also, I dunno—add Ovi for clout? Or starpower?"

"Ovi's most useful with that, but he's also probably going to get us noticed," Nicke says. "And we should try to avoid that. Maybe you should come."

"I would but I have a charity thing," Brooks says. "Sergey reminded me, it's Wish Upon A Par related. I say take Osh, he's got that non-threatening Disney prince vibe. No offense, but you kind of have a murder voice. And murder face. And, uh, general demeanor."

Nicke stares at him.

"Yeah, that's it, that's the one," Brooks says. "So, Burky and Osh for the good cop routine, you and Willy for the bad cop routine. Oh, and I made this up for Burky. He should probably carry it around."

Brooks grabs a plastic bag out of his stall and tosses it over. "Iron, bread, and salt. And some plants that are supposed to help."

Nicke looks into the bag. The iron is easy enough; it's a nail. The bread and salt, though—

"You better tell him he's supposed to carry it, not eat it," Nicke says, holding up the pretzel bun. "What's this?" He shakes the small bottle of pills.

"St. John's Wort," Brooks says. "He probably shouldn't take them without talking to the trainers first. But he can just carry a couple of them."

"Huh," Nicke says, and then fishes the last thing up, a sprig of holly leaves and a cluster of the berries. A couple of the berries have fallen off the sprig and are rolling around in the bottom of the bag.

"There's a bunch of types of plants and trees that're supposed to help, but that was the only one growing in my backyard," Brooks says. "You know, I don't know if we should tell him this bit, but I was reading one of the books and you wouldn't believe what people thought of for love spells. There's a non-zero chance you all drank something that had menstrual blood in it."

"You think the drink was a love spell?" Nicke asks. "Also, yeah, maybe don't drop that on Andre right away."

"I talked to Carly," Brooks says. "He's helped Willy do drink pick-up a few times lately. He says if it's the barista he's thinking of, she always makes eyes at Willy. Willy's a good-looking kid. Seems like a possibility."

"I guess so," Nicke says. "Hey, looks like Ovi's finishing up."

Ovi hangs up. "Hang on, I need to talk to Gus for last finish something," he says, and heads out of the locker room. He pauses. "But, probably gonna be able to get you in soon. Like, soon today. Don't go anywhere."

As he's heading out, Andre and the group come back in, with a couple of the others. They mostly look downcast, so Nicke assumes there was no miraculous healing.

"The horn didn't do anything, even when I rubbed my hand against it," Andre reports. "He just licked Devo a bunch, and he poked Tom again while he was doing squats."

Willy scowls and looks like he's resisting the urge to rub his ass again. Devo looks bashfully pleased. "It tickled, kinda. His breath actually smells like peppermint," he says. "It's weird, but cool."

"It might have just ate the toothpaste tube in Ovi's bathroom again," Nicke says. "It's been doing that. Andre, Willy, Osh, can you stick around? We're going to take a field trip."

Ovi comes back, rubbing his hands together. "Okay, we can go. Hey, you tell Burky that maybe he drank love spell potion with period blood in it yet?"

"What," Andre says.

***

The barista's name is Linnea, but she tells them (well, Willy, anyway) to call her Linny. She's 20; she's only been working at Dulles for a year; she has very elaborate nail art on her perfect turquoise fingernails; she won first place at a tri-state latte foam art contest with her specialization in making Nicolas Cage's face in foam; and within the first two minutes of meeting her in the most discreet back corner of the District Chophouse in the Dulles upper level ticketing terminal, Nicke's certain that that universe is playing a big fucking joke on them. Not because she seems evil or conniving, but because she clearly has no clue who any of them are or what they do for a living, and she's just been crushing on Willy silently for the last year and assuming he's in some kind of business where he travels a ton, and also fucks up his hands and face on the regular.

"I'm really glad, you know?" she says, playing with the end of her braid. "You were always so, like, bruised up and stuff that I was worried you were in a bad relationship or, like. A fight club."

"Oh, Willy's just super clumsy," Oshie says. "Always tripping, running into things."

"Yeah, and sometimes he's just punch a wall because he has to do reports and paperworks and stuff, you know?" Ovi adds.

(In the end, Ovi had refused to be left behind, and since he was the one who somehow arranged for someone inside the secure portion of Dulles to track Linny down from her normal Starbucks in Concourse C and convince her to meet five strange men in a burger restaurant on her break, Nicke hadn't argued too much. Ovi also brought Vee, which Nicke did have a problem with because it was turning into a fucking circus, but apparently it had been because Ovi promised him a full dinner out for his family at Ovi's favorite hibachi restaurant if Vee just drove Ovi's car in a continuous loop around Dulles so that Ovi wouldn't to have to pay for parking.

"You could just tell him to sit in the cell phone lot," Nicke had said. "Or use the valet."

"He needs driving practice," Ovi had said. "Besides, you just mad you don't think to bribe him with rookie points to do same thing."

"Shut up," Nicke had said. "I paid for valet."

"I pay six thousand dollars to send Gus and Gus's girlfriend to LA first class in two hours because we need him to go into airport with pictures of shirtless Willy and talk to coffee girl and tell her to come meet us in outside part of airport," Ovi had said. "I'm coming and Vee can save me parking."

"Your car, your accident, I guess," Nicke had said.)

"But it's nice to meet you, like, for real," she says to Willy, though her eyes keep flicking back and forth between him and Andre. Nicke isn't sure what to read from it. They'd gotten the unicorn into Ovi's car when they were coming from Kettler, but it had done its vanishing act somewhere around the Delta ticketing desk, and it's yet to show up again. Nicke's almost ready to tell Willy to grab Andre and kiss him to see if they can provoke it into coming back.

"Same, same," Willy says. "Look, uh. Linny. I'll level with you. I don't know if you remember, but a while back, you gave me this, uh, special drink on the house."

"Oh, you remembered that?" Linny asks, suddenly perking up. "Did you like it?"

"It was really nice and sweet of you to give me that, but the thing is… I have to ask, was that, like. A normal drink?"

She looks bashful. "I mean, to be honest, the unicorns were a special limited time thing, so… we just had some of the ingredients left from back in the spring when they came out, and I thought it'd be something you liked. You looked like you needed something sweet that day."

"Cool, yeah, cool," Willy says. "So… nothing different in it than normal?"

"I might've tweaked the recipe a little," she admits. Her fingernails drum against the table surface, a rhythmic clicking wave. Nicke can't help looking at them; he can't quite make out what the designs are on her fingernails. There are different patterns of delicate black lines, and he can't quite make them out against the turquoise, but they seem oddly familiar.

Willy sneaks a quick look at the rest of them that screams _Please help_, and Oshie jumps in.

"The thing is, Linny," he says very earnestly, "the rest of us saw the frapp, and Tom's awesome, so he shared it with a bunch of the guys, but we have to be really careful about allergies, so we kinda need to know exactly what ingredients—"

"You _shared_ it?" she says sharply, stilling for a second. Her fingers go still against the tabletop, and Nicke can almost see the design before they curl under, hidden again. "So, you didn't drink the whole thing?"

"I drank most of it," Andre says. His eyes are narrowed slightly. "Tom didn't have any."

Linny looks at Andre and then down at the table. Now her hands are trembling slightly, and she doesn't say anything for a while. The silence grows.

"It was supposed to be for you, though," she eventually says in a small voice, looking up through her lashes at Willy.

Willy shifts in his chair uncomfortably. "Yeah, um, I do appreciate it, for real, it's just…"

"You put something in the drink," Ovi says, leaning forward with both arms on the table. "We know. We need to know what."

"I didn't do anything," she says, but her eyes dart away. "I have to get back to work."

Nicke reaches over and points at her curled over knuckles. "May I please see your nails?" he asks.

"What?" Linny says, and instinctively flexes her fingers out before snatching them back in.

"They're very pretty," Nicke says gently. And now he knows; now he figures out what he's seeing. "Those are runes, right?" She stares at him mutely, eyes huge. "Did you paint them on yourself?"

"Did you put _blood _into my drink?" Andre asks. He's definitely scowling. "Or… other stuff?"

"It wasn't for _you_!" she says, and immediately bursts into loud, messy tears as her hands fly up to cover her face.

Nicke snatches his hand back; Ovi and Oshie both flinch back as well. Willy, sitting next to her, grabs for a napkin to proffer, knocks over his glass of water with his elbow onto the table in the process, curses, grabs the napkin and mops at the sudden spill of water, lifts up the now sodden napkin with a helpless look, and then tries to hide it in the potted plant next to him.

Andre just rolls his eyes, sighs, and then clears his throat. "It's fine. I'm not mad. None of us are mad. Not even Tom. We just need to know something."

Linny makes an inarticulate shuddery squeak that somehow manages to sound questioning.

"It's just, if you cast a spell, it's all wrong," Andre says. "You need to take the unicorn back at least. He's cute but he shits everywhere and I'm tired of him stabbing all my friends."

That's enough to get Linny to drop her hands and stare at him. She has remarkably stay-proof eye makeup, Nicke notes. "What?" she says.

"The unicorn," Andre says. "There's a unicorn following me around ever since I had your drink, but not everyone can see him, and he stabs a bunch of people whenever they touch me, and he makes other people try to have sex with me, and it _sucks_."

"I mean, I just, I don't know," she says. "I don't—I just looked up a love spell online! It's just supposed to make you notice someone!"

"Online magic?" Oshie says. "Is that a thing?"

"It's a reputable Wiccan site!" Linny says.

"Can you just undo… whatever?" Ovi asks.

"But it didn't _do _anything," Linny says. "I made it mostly like normal. I just added some stuff to the fairy powders."

"Fairy powders?" Willy says, eyebrows almost climbing off his face.

"Oh, they were part of the frappe recipe. They're mostly just dyed sugar and citric acid to begin with," she says dismissively. "Basically, Fun Dip. I lit some candles and did the love spell, and all it's supposed to do is make the person who drinks it notice you if you give it them, and… just kinda like you, a little? I took the herbs—I used rose petals and hibiscus and some rosemary in it—and I ground them up in one of our bean grinders to get them really fine, and I mixed them with the powder and drizzle."

She pauses and wrinkles her brow like she's trying to remember. "I didn't use fresh rosemary because they were out at Giant that morning," she says. "I used dried rosemary, from the spice cabinet. I wonder if that messed it up."

"What spell did you use?" Nicke asks. "Did you have your fingernails like that?"

"What?" She looks down at her hands. "Um, similar, but not the same as these? I just copied the rune designs out of a book because I liked them. They didn't have anything to do with the spell. Some of them might be wrong, because I didn't have enough space on my nail to fit the whole thing."

"Ah," Nicke says.

All of this is making a terrible sense to him. Nicke doesn't_ do_ magic. But he's heard enough to know how shit can go haywire, the same as any chemical procedure. A match dropped onto paper burns differently from a matched dropped into a container of gasoline. Spells can be tricky. There's a need to be careful, because some spells are so powerful they only need to be spoken, without intent, for them to cause a reaction, unwanted or otherwise.

"It was going to be a full moon, too," Linny says. "The website said working your magic under a full moon increases the strength and vitality of the spell." She raises her hands, drops them. "I did little things before, you know, like cantrips and stuff to get better tips. The pay here is kinda shit, and if you get assigned the concourse with the international flights, everyone's always in a hurry and no one wants to tip."

"Yeah, I worked at an ice cream stand in Minnesota once," Oshie says. "I feel that. No one feels generous when it's like twenty below, but then why would you buy ice cream in the first place. It's stupid."

"And you get tired of having to put up with the lines some of the gross guys use, and you have to act like it's normal or you don't mind." She smiles at Willy, a little tremulously. "You were always really nice, and you never said stuff like that, and I liked you and you were cute, and I thought maybe you would… I just… thought it would give me a little edge. I don't have a ton of experience, and I thought it might make me stand out, kinda."

Willy makes a placatory gesture with his hands, waving them about. "No, you're fine, you're good."

"Seriously, did you bleed into my drink, though," Andre asks, arms crossed over his chest

"Fuck, I'm so going to get fired," she says, and her face contorts differently than it had when she'd been crying before. This looks more real.

Nicke doesn't feel too bad about it or sorry for her; he has strong opinions about the morality here. Even when it's not as malicious as it could be, _not_ messing with someone's food or drink in order to seduce them is still an extremely low bar of behavior to clear, and that's leaving magic out of the equation. But he also has to think about avoiding complications at this point, and not burning any bridges or potential solutions for fixing the whole thing, and whether he likes it or not, he probably needs to keep Linny willing to help them if she can, and not get her fired.

"No one gets anyone fired," Ovi says firmly. "We just need to get rid of Burky's unicorn."

"But I don't understand. I really don't know what you mean about that," Linny says. And of course, that's when the unicorn shows up, coming through the swinging doors of the kitchen and meandering up to their table. The waiter swinging down the aisle just barely avoids clipping it as he turns a corner with a tray, and he looks around with a puzzled expression.

Ovi points. "Him."

"What?" Linny asks. She follows the line of his finger. "Is there—are you saying there's a unicorn?"

"You can't see him?" Willy says.

"She didn't drink it," Nicke says. "The original frapp."

"I see… something, kinda?" Linny says doubtfully. "The air looks all shimmery, like over a stove. I don't see a unicorn, though."

"If it makes you feel better, I can't see it either," Willy says. "These guys all can, but not me."

"They can?" She frowns again. "And you said it's because of drinking the frapp? So, basically, everyone _but _you drank it."

"Well, kinda," Willy says. "I'm more of a coffee guy, honestly."

"It tastes good," Ovi says. "It was a good drink, even with sex magic."

"It wasn't sex magic," Linny snaps, a little too quickly. Nicke can't think of any possible way he can ask the question he needs to know without it coming off as creepy or threatening. Fortunately, that's when Andre and his lack of shame, plus his willingness to say anything comes in handy.

"But, when you said you didn't have a ton of experience, you meant, like, sex?" he says.

Linny goes red and picks at the tablecloth. Andre makes a slightly muffled grunt, like he got kicked by at least two different people under the table at the same time.

"Virginity is an outdated social construct that society has made up to commodify bodies and create an unrealistic and contradictory standard for male and female sexual expression," Nicke says, because it had sounded pretty solid the way Holtby had said it first, and then pushes back from the table. "Linny, thanks for taking time from your break and meeting with us. Can you give Tom your number so we can call or text you if anything else comes up? He'll give you his."

"Really?" she says, brightening.

"Uh," Willy says, and then he jolts, like four people kicked him at once from four different directions under the table. "Yeah. Here, give me your number, I'll text you."

She rattles off a number. Willy enters it, then sends a text. "Cool."

"Do you mind if the rest of us keep it too?" Nicke asks and taps away at his phone, looking up the others. Oshie and Ovi obediently pick their phones up; Andre is busy petting the unicorn.

After a few seconds of typing, they all put their phones away and manage to get away from the table and out to the concourse.

"Awesome," Oshie says, radiating sincerity. "We really do appreciate it." He offers her his hand to shake, and then shrugs and gives her a hug. "Hey, hey. It's going to be okay, you know? None of us are going to say anything to where you work; just be careful in the future, okay? We'll keep you up to date with whatever happens with the unicorn."

Nicke offers Linny his hand to shake when Oshie is done; he stares at Ovi over her shoulder and flicks his eyes to Willy. Ovi nods and elbows Willy. Willy comes over and (only a little stiffly) hugs Linny, who looks like she's going to start crying again, but fortunately does not.

"It's okay," he says. "Don't worry about anything."

"You're so _nice_," she said, only a little tearfully and then she looks at her phone and says, "Oh my God, I have to get over to C in five minutes for my next shift, I have to go, bye, thank you, your next order is completely on the house, I swear!" and races off.

"Well, we're gonna have to just go to the Starbucks on Glebe before away games now," Willy says, as they make their way to the arrivals drop-off. "Or get used to Dunks. Ugh. We can't do that, Carly'll never let us live it down."

"Burky, how you know how to handle girls crying?" Ovi asks, clearly impressed.

"I have sisters," Andre says. "None of you do. I've seen them pull that from when we were kids until now. I know exactly when it's real and when it's fake crying."

"I do know it, but I'm just kinda weak to it," Oshie admits. "Lauren makes fun of me when I fall for it from Lyla and Len."

"Holy shit, Burky," Willy says, and salutes him with his drink. "Hey, can you do it too?"

Andre ducks his head down and doesn't look up for about thirty seconds; when he does, his eyes are brimming with tears, and then he blinks hard twice, and they start spilling down his cheeks.

"Holy _shit_," Willy repeats gleefully. "You gotta do that in game sometime, see if you can buy us a penalty."

"You just have to think about sad things," Andre explains. "And then try not to cry, because if you try not to, you will. You have to, like, squeeze and sorta flex right here," he says, pointing to the corners of his eyes right on either side of his nose, near the bridge.

Nicke ignores the sight of four grown men scrunching their faces up and grimacing like they just bit into lemons. "Did you get it?" he asks Oshie.

"Oh, sorry. Yep," Oshie says. He stops making faces and holds out a long blonde hair that he managed to lift off Linny's shoulder while hugging her.

"Good, thanks," Nicke says, and fishes in his pocket for a tissue that he can wrap it in and stow it away.

"Is that what you were texting about?" Andre says. "Oh, sorry. What will you do with it? Also, she_ totally_ put her blood in the drink, I just know it."

"Probably," Nicke says. "It would explain a lot."

"Explain what?" Ovi says, and then his phone beeps at him. "Oh shit, Vee's lost. Hang on."

"How can he get lost, all he had to do was go in a circle around the airport," Nicke says. "Anyway, probably she thought it would be like in books or movies like when people do magic. And because she changed some things in her spell, recipe, whatever, she got different results. Probably she had no idea it would happen."

"So it's like in Harry Potter when Snape wants them to brew the Draught of Peace in Order of the Phoenix where you have to add the ingredients in the right order and stir it the right number of times and in the right direction and have the fire be a certain temperature and wait exactly the right number of minutes?" Willy asks.

"Sure, yes," Nicke says, stifling a sigh because it always comes back to Harry fucking Potter. "Magic has consequences. If you change even one thing, you could get something different. And now, after all that, there's at least five different things that probably were different."

Any of those on their own—virgin blood, a full moon, the herbs, the target of the spell ending up as someone else, the stupid fucking runes on her fingernails—would have probably sufficed to throw a wrench in the works of things. All in combination, he should probably be glad it didn't turn out even worse than an unexpected unicorn with an unhealthy interest in Andre's sex life.

"Everything's kind of opposite, isn't it?" Oshie says, looking thoughtful. "She thought she was doing something to make Willy notice her. Instead, everyone's noticing Burky. I mean, not everyone. Like, the ones the unicorn is whammying, so it wants them to notice him. But it stops other people from getting close to him or touching him."

"No one on the team's been whammied, though," Willy says. "No one's been trying to make out with Burky. It keeps fucking stabbing _me_."

"You hang out with Burky a lot, you're always touching him. It's just working the odds," Oshie says. "And it's poked almost all of us, don't be a baby. But no, I think there's something here. Think opposites. What did Brooksy say? That virgins usually catch unicorns? Because unicorns are attracted to virgins?"

"_I'm not a virgin_," Andre says. "I _told_ you guys that."

"Yeah, but, like. At the rink, you've had all those teenagers after you, every day. Like, more than usual, even for you," Oshie said. "Also those other guys from the beer league. Huh. Maybe they're religious or something."

Willy's a half step behind but getting there rapidly. "Burky's attracting virgins? Boy, who saw_ that_ coming." He dodges Burky's punch, and then stumbles when the unicorn deliberately gets in his way. "Ow."

"I think murdercorn _makes_ virgins attracted to Burky," Ovi corrects. "Probably getting mad when people not virgins try to get with or grope Burky. Willy, you're not pure and good virgin."

"It's a social construct, Holts says so," Willy says. "There's stuff I haven't done. I could be virginal for that stuff."

"Okay, so why didn't the rest of us get personal murdercorns," Oshie says. "How come Burky's the only one?"

"He was the first to drink the thing," Nicke says. "The magic probably stuck on him. And he drank the most of it."

"Well, it was _my_ drink," Andre says.

"I mean, technically it was _my_ drink," Willy says.

"And if she's a virgin, why wasn't the murdercorn whammying her?" Oshie says.

"I don't know why you guys expect me to know everything," Nicke says. "A lot of this, I don't have any idea either."

"Because you're always smartest, Backy, duh," Ovi says. "Even if you don't know something, you're probably the guy who's gonna figure it out."

"So, what are you going to do with the hair?" Andre asks. "Are you going to make a voodoo doll?"

"If she caused this with a spell, we maybe can use it for a spell to undo it. I'll have to ask around," Nicke says. "Usually you need part of the original person who does the spell, and this seemed easiest to get. I didn't think she'd just give us some blood or whatever if we asked."

"See? You know all that smart stuff," Ovi says. "But maybe we don't need spell anyway. I think we can fix it. Just think. If murdercorn really wants virgins to jump Burky, probably Burky just need to, you know."

He makes a loose fist with his left hand and pokes the forefinger of his right hand into it several times rapidly. "And boom," he says, throwing his hands apart with a flourish.

"So, we just need to let one of the people throwing themselves at him to actually go all the way with Burky?" Willy says.

"That seems kinda weird in a way, though," Oshie says. "Like, what if they wouldn't _want_ to get with Burky if the murdercorn wasn't making them feel that way? No offense, Burky."

"Whatever, I'm a catch," Andre says. "I am very hot and sexy."

"No, Oshbabe's got a good point," Ovi says. "Plus, Sergey kill us all if you sleep with underage virgin. We need to find someone who's not got whammy before we ask them, and who's not gonna get Burky sent to jail for underage, and who's not gonna put it on twitter that they sleep with Burky."

"How do you find a virgin to sleep with you without sounding like a total sleaze?" Willy asks. "And how do we find out they're a legit virgin ahead of time? If you post that on Craigslist, you're gonna get arrested."

"No, it's networking," Ovi says. "You sleep with other hockey player, that's how you keep it low down." He's scrolling through his phone, lips pursed. "Keep it in house. That's easiest. Too bad no one our team's virgin right now. Maybe one of the Bears? We get a callup?"

"You mean on the downlow," Oshie says. "Also, O, that almost sounds like you expect to find a virgin NHL player for Burky to get busy with. I think that might be even rarer than a fucking unicorn. I don't know if any of those exist at all."

"Someone Surfer Bird the team to discuss it. We're going to need a list. Actually, I might know someone," Nicke says. He pulls out his phone. "Aren't the Leafs coming to town soon, after the roadie?"

***

Andre won't stop fidgeting and jiggling his leg. Nicke would smack him, except Andre's had to go through hand surgery that's going to keep him off the ice for the next two months, and he missed the Canada road trip, and he had to watch from the pressbox as the Caps were shut out by the Leafs earlier today, and William Nylander is on his way over for Andre and he to mutually deflower each other of their anal virginity in one of Ovi's guest bedrooms. So he's had a trying week in general.

Not that Nicke's week hasn't been much less trying than Andre's, but he doesn't have to have awkward sex tonight with anyone, so he's doing slightly better. Slightly. He'll have to give Andre triple rookie points for this.

"How do you know Nylander is a virgin?" Ovi asks for the tenth time, and Nicke feels safe enough smacking _him_.

Nicke had suggested earlier in the evening that Ovi might want to make himself scarce to make it a little less weird, but Ovi had snorted. "No fucking way in hell I miss _this_."

"Fine, you can take over completely if you want," Nicke had said. "I'll go home and you can oversee."

"You can't leave," Andre had said. "You need to support me."

"I can support you over the phone," Nicke had suggested, but Andre had simply stared at him balefully and Nicke is resigned to playing his own role in this.

Now, he leans against the counter in the kitchen and rubs his temples. He's been trying not to overdo the allergy medication doses, but it's been a fine balance to walk, especially since he's been spending so much time over at Ovi's house with him and Andre and the unicorn. The fluorescent lights in Ovi's kitchen are beginning to bother his eyes, and the last thing he needs right now is for his occasional migraines to collide with his fucking allergies.

"Because he told me," Nicke says wearily. "It came up in conversation before. He told me about it a _lot_, as a matter of fact."

It had been an intense conversation. William had maintained eye contact nearly the entire time he was confessing, and he hadn't blinked much. He'd also kept licking his lips every few seconds. Nicke had made a variety of noncommittal yet supportive noises and wondered desperately if Michael could somehow sense this from wherever he was and was laughing evilly about it in revenge for when Michael had been assigned by McPhee to give him a sex lecture at the start of the 2007-2008 season. There's still a section of River Road and Massachusetts Avenue that gives him horrifying flashbacks to being trapped in the car on the way to Verizon Center (it's supposed to be Capital One Arena now, but he keeps slipping up) and hearing Michael quote statistics about gonorrhea in a strained and deliberate drone of a voice.

"And then when I called him to find out if he was still that way, he said yes," Nicke continues. "He said it right away."

That had _also_ been an intense conversation. When Nicke had asked him if he would be willing to have sex when he came into town, William had been driving to practice but had seemed initially enthusiastic; when Nicke had been awkwardly explaining that he was calling Andre's behalf, the call had dropped, and they'd spent a confusing few minutes playing phone tag back and forth trying to connect.

William had been more cautious when they finally managed to be on the line together again, but still willing when Nicke had sworn that it would count as a major favor. He'd wanted to know why and how and where, how long, if it was just sex or there were any other activities, what was expected, and if Nicke was going to be there for any of it. Nicke had tried to pass the phone off to Andre several times, but Andre was no more enthused about it, and kept routing all his answers and return queries through Nicke as well.

"You were in Juniors together," Nicke had hissed, muting his phone briefly. "You already know each other. You just talk to him."

"It's too weird," Andre had said. "I can't. You do it."

"Are you going to not talk to him the entire time you both have your dicks out?" Nicke had asked.

"Maybe," Andre had said, still looking sullen.

Ovi had complicated things further, though there was a reasonable point hiding in it. "Which of them gonna be on top? Because you don't know if murdercorn thinks mouth stuff counts, or if both of them gotta do it, or what."

"Yeah, I mean, it's probably safer to cover all the bases," Willy had said. "Like, you don't know what the murdercorn considers a social construct. Plus, it seems more fair if they both get their shot."

Explaining the unicorn over the phone had been even more difficult, and William had asked four times if he had a concussion, before accepting Nicke's insistence otherwise. All in all, it had felt like a longer and more exhausting contract discussion than his own long-term deal in 2010.

And now, Nicke's managed to bully Andre out of sweatpants, ("It's just William," Andre had complained. "He's seen me look way worse in Juniors,") to comb his hair, and get off Ovi's basement couch in order to wait in the kitchen.

Ovi, in deference to the occasion, has dimmed the lights and lit a bunch of candles for mood setting. It's only slightly ruined by the Russian rap music playing in the background. He's also been shoving pelmeni at Andre at the rate of roughly five dumplings a minute, as well as stocking up on Gatorade. As they sit, he ladles another couple in the bowl. "You got big night ahead, Burky. You should carb load," Ovi says. He leans in conspiratorially. "If you need them, smelling salts in my bathroom cabinet. You know, if you need energy boost."

The unicorn has been hanging around outside, mostly, though Nicke doesn't see it from the window right now. With his hand keeping him off the ice, Andre's been splitting his time between Ovi's place and his own, though he's at Kettler with the rest of them for video review and off ice workouts. Nicke doesn't know if the unicorn has somehow sensed what they're up to, but it's been more unpredictable about where it'll appear of late.

When William texts that his Uber is outside the gate, Ovi opens it. About two minutes later when the doorbell rings, Andre stubbornly stays sitting at the table. Nicke holds in a sigh and gets up to answer it himself. William's on the doorstep, still in his gameday suit but apparently showered with fresh comb tracks in his hair, and a bottle of wine in his hand. He's looking down at his phone with the other, but when Nicke opens the door, he shoves it in his pocket and smiles. "Nicke!"

"Hey, William," Nicke says, and gives him a quick hug. "Thanks again for this. Come in."

"This is for you," William says, thrusting the wine at him quickly.

"Thanks," Nicke says, and takes a quick look at the label. "You get this here in DC with a fake ID, or did you have to buy it in Toronto and bring it over the border?"

William laughs, probably more than Nicke's quip deserves. "Well, after the game, I thought I should give you something."

"Don't remind me," Nicke says, and leads the way back into Ovi's kitchen, switching back to English. "Hey, guys."

"Look who's here," Ovi says.

"Hey," Andre says without much enthusiasm, but at least he stands up and goes for a half-hug, half-handshake with William, looking over his shoulder at Nicke. "Good to see you. Sorry this is so fucking weird."

"He brought wine," Nicke says, and brandishes the bottle.

"Oh good, open it, I need something to make this less weird," Andre says.

"Are you sure?" Nicke says, and then decides that a couple glasses of wine are actually the perfect thing to lubricate this whole bizarre little party, and probably aren't going to get in the way of either Andre or William's ability to get it up. Split between the two of them, they should be just fine. He hefts the bottle up. "I like the eagle on the label," he offers.

"You can open it," William says to Nicke, still in Swedish. "It reminds me a little of the old jersey you guys used to have. When it was blue, remember. But I don't think you ever wore it."

"Yeah, they changed the jersey the year I came over," Nicke says, sticking to English because Ovi's paying attention to the conversation. "I never wore the screaming eagle jersey. I was in the red ones from the start."

"C'mon, open the wine," Andre says. He and William are still standing next to each other; Andre is eyeing William carefully, eyes flicking from him to around the room. Nicke thinks he's looking for the unicorn and any signs of whammying. As he crosses the kitchen to look for a wine opener in Ovi's cutlery drawers, he takes a look out the window to see if he can spot the unicorn out there. He doesn't see anything from the window, but that doesn't mean it's not down on the deck, directly beneath them. "I like the red jersey. When I got drafted, I thought it was cool."

"You wear the black building jersey for the draft," Ovi says. "I remember that."

"You better," Nicke says. "You were there handing it to me. You looked more nervous than me, I thought."

"George made me speak English then," Ovi says. "In front of everyone and especially All Star Nicklas Backstrom who's gonna be my center. I don't wanna fuck it up."

"Uh huh," Nicke says, sifting through another drawer. They're not organized at all; so far he's found three different ice scream scoopers but no wine opener. "Ovi, where the hell is the wine opener? Why do you have so many ice cream scoopers?"

"Left drawer, I think," Ovi says. "Under plates cabinet." He lets the legs of his chair come down with a thud. "Anyway, red's good color."

"I like blue," William says, changing to English like the rest of them. "Too bad, Nicke, it's your best color. You can only wear it with the Tre Kronor jersey."

Ovi's been drumming his fingers on the kitchen table and tilting back on his chair contemplatively; when he hears William finally switch to English, he tilts his head, and looks at William with a wide smile.

"Sure, Backy wears blue jersey too, in Russia with me during lockout," Ovi says. "Dynamo Moscow legend Nicklas Backstrom. You're right, looked good."

"How's your dad?" Nicke asks, trying to work yet another drawer open. There's something sticking up in the back, jamming it. "Andre, can you look for wine glasses?"

"He's good," William says. "He texts me a lot. Usually when I mess something up in a game. We should take a picture and send it to him. He'll probably laugh."

"Little Nylander," Ovi muses. "Can't believe it sometimes, you're here in NHL. You know, so weird when seeing you grow up here, when your dad's here. Feels like we see you from being a baby, change your diapers and shit."

William immediately goes rigid and flushes a dull brick-red. "You did _not_."

"You sure? Feels like it was you," Ovi says, stroking his chin pensively.

"I was almost a _teenager _when I was living here," William snaps.

"Huh. Lots of Nylander kids, sorry," Ovi says. "Wait, no, right, yeah. Your little sister, she's the baby when Nyles plays here." He snaps his fingers. "Now I remember. Pool party!"

"Pool party?" Andre asks, looking interested, while the same time William says, "_Shut up_."

Ovi just keeps on smiling, big and sunny and amused. "No, I remember. It was pool party, start of season, your dad throws great party for all families. Invites families and all the young guys like me and Nicke and Brooksy and Sasha and Greenie, too. Awesome time. You make it fun, you decide to run around naked, go streaking. Like, little Nylander, party animal."

"You're just making shit up," William says.

"He didn't streak on purpose, that was when you were doing the cannonball contest," Nicke says distractedly, still trying to find the wine opener. "Your suit came off, right, William? When you were jumping in." William makes a slight choking noise. "It was just an accident, anyway. You were a little kid."

He uncovers the wine opener at last, under yet another ice cream scooper and next to a melon baller. Nicke can't think of a single time Ovi would be likely to have used a melon baller; it still has a price tag sticker on it. "Ah. Found it."

By the time he has the cork prized out and the wine open, it's gone very quiet in the kitchen. William still looks flushed; Ovi is sprawled forward on his chair with a heavy-lidded smile and his chin propped on his hand. Andre, miraculously, has made himself useful and managed to find the cupboard where Ovi has his wineglasses, and now he's lining them all up very carefully on the edge of the counter. Nicke pours wine into each glass and passes them out; William takes three long gulps to half empty his glass.

"It's very nice wine," Ovi says. He hasn't taken his eyes off William the entire time. "Very smooth. You have good taste, little Nylander."

William picks up his glass and swirls it around. "Thanks, I learned from Nicke. He was good at teaching."

"You taught Other Willy how to drink?" Andre asks. "Like, at Worlds? What the fuck, you wouldn't even let me have beer at your house when I stayed there."

"Why am I Other Willy?" William asks. "I was here first. Like, I grew up here, and then there was Juniors."

"You're on the Leafs, you're not here now, we already have a Willy here," Andre says. "Seriously, Nicke, that's not fair, he's younger than me."

"I bought you beer for your apartment housewarming party, didn't I?" Nicke says. He takes a sip of wine, wondering how fast he can politely drink it, get Ovi to drink his, and then haul both of them out so William and Andre can do things to each other that he doesn't want to think about. "Besides, Mac threatened me not to let you do anything. And I know Ovi brought you enough vodka to kill a horse for your party."

It might even have been enough to kill a unicorn. It had been a literal crate full of vodka, and had taken both Kuzy and Snarls to carry into the apartment.

"Yeah," Ovi says. "Backy is scary dad. He does all discipline and spanking. I'm fun dad."

William accidentally coughs while taking another sip, and sputters wine everywhere; Ovi thumps him on the back hard, several times. Andre continues to be helpful and hustles off for the roll of papers towels on the counter, while Nicke covertly gulps down most of his wine—it is rather nice, big bodied and opulent—and wonders if the unicorn is ever going to show up.

Andre comes back with a wad of paper towels and a can of Sprite. "Is this the stuff you can use to get red wine stains out?" he asks and cracks the top of the can without waiting for an answer.

"Jesus Christ," Nicke says, and grabs the paper towels before Andre can drench William in Sprite. "No, you use seltzer and salt. Ovi, do you have seltzer? Or club soda, that works."

"Um," Ovi says doubtfully. "Maybe in wet bar? I'll look." He gets to his feet, stretches, and ambles towards what Nicke assumes is one of the three different wet bars on this floor of the house alone.

"Sorry," Nicke says, and proffers the paper towels to William. "Dab it, don't rub. No, not like that. Let me do it." He takes the paper towels back and tries to blot the worst of it out, patting all over William's chest. "We should just rinse your shirt out, probably. Sorry."

"Oh, okay," William says, still sounding a little breathless from his coughing fit. "Hang on, then." He grabs the hem of his t-shirt and pulls it off entirely. There is just something about Ovi's house that encourages people to get shirtless; Nicke mentally notes to figure out some sort of comment he can throw at Ovi about this later. "Okay, there." He puts his arms out to his sides and turns around slowly, then steps towards Nicke. "Did any soak through that I need to wipe off?"

Andre is taking the opportunity to check William out, which is good; Nicke thinks Willy might be trying to flex, which is also probably good. Sexual encounters have been built on much less. In fact, maybe he should just make his escape now and see if Andre and William can make this into some kind of foreplay, since William's shirt is off already, and they can just get the evening started.

"Oh, it's like pool party now," Ovi says, coming back into the room with a bottle of seltzer, which he tosses to William. To his credit, William catches it, though not without a few seconds of perilous juggling. "Maybe we all get naked."

"No, I think we need to go talk right now," Nicke says to Ovi. "You can show me that place up the street you said I should see."

"Place?" Ovi says, and then catches on with transparent enthusiasm. "Oh, yeah, that place. Burky, you show Little Nylander where washing machine in laundry room is, I'm gonna show Nicke special place. Up the street."

"Don't call me Little Nylander," William says, at the same time Andre is says, "I don't even know where your laundry room is," but by then Ovi has already chugged his wine, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and is headed for the door with a spring in his step.

Even though it was his excuse, Nicke feels slightly guilty about just flat out bailing, and wonders if there's anything he should add. William looks pouty and betrayed, wringing his shirt between his hands, and Andre looks pouty and confused, though he keeps eyeing William from the side. Nicke takes a breath and briefly contemplates which option is going to cause him more mental scarring: advising Andre and William through the finer points of anal sex, or leaving them to it, having them fail at it, and then dealing with the fallout from _that_.

He exhales and decides that they both have smartphones and the internet, and therefore are fully equipped to take this adventure on their own. "We'll just let you catch up for a while. We'll text when we're headed back," he says, and follows after Ovi.

Ovi's already waiting on the front step; he has Blake on a leash. That really would have been a better excuse to use, and Nicke is annoyed at himself for not thinking of it. They start walking down Ovi's neighborhood's street, feet scuffling through the yellow and brown leaves that are drifted up in piles along the curb. All the trees stretch bare black arms into the night sky, and Nicke can smell woodsmoke in the air from where someone has a fire going.

"Why were you being a dick to William?" Nicke asks Ovi, after a few minutes of silence.

Ovi looks surprised, and then a little sheepish. "Me?" he asks. "What?"

Nicke doesn't let him off the hook. "Don't pretend. Why were you being a jerk? He's doing us a favor."

"_You_ a favor," Ovi corrects, and then reconsiders. "And Burky."

"Mostly Burky," Nicke says, and then he thinks about what form that favor is probably taking place in right now and he mentally winces, then draws himself back to the issue at hand. "Anyway, it was weird. You were weird."

"_I_ was weird?" Ovi says. "Who just takes shirt off in someone's house on fuck-date—" Nicke winces again, not mentally this time—"with someone else?"

"Uh, you," Nicke says dryly. "Except you usually take your pants off too."

Ovi looks genuinely offended and flaps the hand that isn't holding onto the leash in the air. "Never. That's rude. He's on fuck-date with _Burky_. He should be paying attention to _Burky,_ trying to get into Burky pants—"

"We did ask him, like, directly to have sex with Andre," Nicke says. "I think, uh, I think he's probably pretty sure they're gonna do it. Stop saying fuck-date."

"He should still make effort," Ovi says. "He should seduce Burky. You know, buy him chocolate, deliver sixty-five roses, hire a band to sing under the window. At least, like, bring heart-shaped pizza!"

"He brought wine?" Nicke offers.

"For you," Ovi says. "Doesn't count. It's rude."

"Nothing about this is…" Nicke deliberates on which word he wants. "Ideal. It's weird and awkward and crazy. It's worst for Andre but it's probably tough for William, too. To… perform."

Ovi doesn't say anything but he lets his eyebrows indicate exactly what he thinks of that.

"Ugh, whatever, just don't ruin this," Nicke says. "Just… let them fuck, and this get fixed. Hopefully. I don't want to pimp Andre out to anyone else."

Ovi makes a face at that as well. "Fine, fine," he says, and then sighs. "Just, you know. It's funny. I'm think about, you know, when little Nyles is in there. Remember when we were real young guys, and we still have Greenie and Sasha and Brooksy? Play like crazy, score like crazy. And we think we gonna win it all, and then, just…"

He sighs again, and he doesn't need to say anything after that because Nicke knows, Nicke was there for every year of those exhilarating highs of the Young Gun era, as well as every heartbreaking low and each one's end. And now he and Ovi are the only ones left of that group, and somehow when Nicke wasn't looking, they became the vets. Ovi has tired eyes and his hair is grayer each day; Nicke's hip hurts him when it rains more often than it doesn't. He's aware of what the media are saying about them and how their window is closed.

And in his heart of hearts, Nicke knows that while he's been there for it all, it's still Ovi who's taken and will continue to take the worst of the blame and criticism for every year the Capitals aren't the last team standing, and Nicke is selfishly grateful for it. There's always a point in every season that he can set his watch by—the interview for the latest article or video (and more often both) where he'll be asked, _how do you feel about being reunited with/taken off Ovi's line, is it difficult being in Ovi's shadow, don't you mind not being in the spotlight the way Ovi is, don't you care that you get overlooked because of Ovi, don't you want people to know who _you_ are?_

And Nicke's answer is always going to be _fuck no_. He can't think of anything he wants less, than to be under the spotlight and have everyone in his business. He and Ovi have screamed furiously at each other countless times over the course of their time together, over every possible thing from the quality of shooting lanes to leaving wet towels on the hotel bathroom floor during road games, but he's never resented or been angry about being in Ovi's shadow, and Ovi has never tried to shift any blame or guilt to Nicke, deserved or not.

At least being old has made them develop a sense of humor about it. In 2010, Nicke had stolen some index cards from Bruce in order to write a list of the usual phrases about the topic on each of them, and then he and Ovi had covertly competed to see who could incite and check off the most phrases in each of their interviews in one sitting. Ovi had the advantage of more interview time, but Nicke cheats better and more ruthlessly than Ovi, and now it's a yearly tradition.

If Ovi sees shades of their past in William and the Leafs' present, Nicke understands that. He remembers watching Christian and Andre on the plane on their first road trip of the season, and both admiring and resenting their youth.

"It's fine," he says to Ovi. "I know." Because he does.

"Ugh, now I'm mad again. I need some cheer up," Ovi says. "Let's kill Mike Milbury."

"You need to stop ending all your rookie mentoring conversations with that," Nicke says. "Or at least follow through. Anyway, maybe it will work out even better. Maybe William and Andre will fall in love."

A beat of silence and then Ovi starts laughing like Nicke's said the funniest thing in the world.

"Oh, fuck, Backy, you, you think, oh fuck," he gasps, in between long wheezing laughs. Nicke laughs along too, but after a few seconds, it feels weird because he was mostly joking but it's not_ that_ funny.

After a while, Ovi's laughter just dies down to giggles. Nicke's almost annoyed by now, because he feels like he's missing out on an inside joke. Maybe there was something in the group chat about this that he just skimmed past.

"Maybe," Ovi says, still hiccupping with laughter. "Anyway, like you say, let them try and fix." He suddenly sobers up and looks like he's had a new thought. "You think they remember condoms?"

"I bought some and lube too, and I put it in the guest room bathroom, and I set a reminder alarm on Andre's phone," Nicke says. "I thought it was too much risk to depend on them to think of it."

"Backy, you _are_ pimp," Ovi says approvingly, and Nicke winces yet again.

He looks at his watch. "How long do you think we need to give them, anyway?" he asks, and as if in response to that, his phone starts vibrating in his pocket. He digs it out, sees Andre's name on the screen, and slides his thumb across to answer it.

"Andre?" he asks. "Are you… done? Already?"

It's barely been twenty minutes since they left, but they're young, so it's certainly possible.

"_The unicorn stabbed William in the ass!"_ Andre screeches hysterically out of his phone, and just like that, they're back to square one.

***

The bleeding's mostly stopped by the time they got back to the house, though the hysterics from both William and Andre haven't: William naked in Ovi's guest bathroom shower stall where he's hiding from the unicorn, with a hand towel pressed to one cheek of his ass, and Andre (in underwear, at least) in a corner of the bedroom, holed up with his phone. The unicorn is pacing angrily up and down the upstairs hallway, tossing its head and snorting.

"You are so much trouble," Ovi tells it. He'd swung away into the kitchen when they'd both burst back into the house, and now Nicke sees he has an apple in one hand, and a box of Lucky Charms in the other. "Here, nice murdercorn. Come eat apple, stop stabbing people right now."

The unicorn snorts and stomps its hoof, but it also stretches its neck out, eyes greedily set on the apple. It takes a few steps towards Ovi.

"Get it downstairs," Nicke says, trying to edge around it.

"Can horses go down stairs?" Ovi asks. "I dunno if he can."

"It's a magic fucking unicorn, it can probably do stairs," Nicke snaps.

Ovi rolls his eyes. "Look, I get it into this bedroom, you get Burky and Nylander downstairs," Ovi says, walking backwards into another guest bedroom as the unicorn follows him.

As soon as the unicorn is in the other room, Nicke slips into the bedroom. Andre throws himself at Nicke, and then William throws himself at Nicke, and Nicke has one foot and just enough wits left to kick the door shut before an angry whinnying noise sounds out in the hallway, and the unicorn's horn partially crunches though the fucking door.

"Whoa! Whoa! Bad murdercorn! Come back!" he hears Ovi shouting. Nicke manages to shove Andre and William into each other's arms enough to get them off and behind him, and then he grabs onto the damn horn with one hand before the unicorn can pull it back out to charge the door again, trying his best to hold it in place, and flips the doorknob's lock with the other. The horn feels burning hot against his hand, but he grabs it with both and doesn't let go.

"Both of you go in the bathroom and close the door," he says over his shoulder. "Put clothes on," he adds, because he really should have led with that first.

"I'm not hanging around in the same place with him. It stabbed me when I was with him!" William says.

"Maybe it knew you sucked at being a virgin," Andre says. "Or remembering who you were in bed with," he adds, low enough under his breath so Nicke almost doesn't hear it. He doesn't have time for this right now.

"I will let it stab both of you if you don't do what I say right now," Nicke says, trying to brace his shoulder against the door and still keep a hold of the horn. His throat itches. He has no idea what he's going to do if it does bust through. Sneeze it to death, maybe. The unicorn keeps trying to headbutt its way through the door, though with its position and Nicke keeping a grip on the horn, it doesn't have as much leverage as it needs.

God, he hopes it's not intelligent enough to simply teleport into the bedroom.

"Hang on, hang on, hang on!" he hears Ovi calling frantically; then there's a funny noise he can't identify, a sort of metallic twang, and the unicorn makes a surprised, high-pitched whinny. It keeps shoving at the door, but then it also starts panting. A few more minutes, and the shoves come slower. Nicke doesn't let go of the horn, though. It still feels burning hot against his hands.

He can hear Ovi on the other side of the door. "Shh, shh, shh," Ovi says, and then there's a lot of Russian crooning, and suddenly he can hear Ovi's voice almost directly in his ear, like he's pressed up against the door like Nicke is, with only a couple inches of pressboard between them. "Backy? Let go. I think it's calm."

Nicke carefully releases his grip, and the horn slips back through the door as the unicorn backs away. He looks down at his hands as he does, almost expecting to see blistered skin, but they're fine.

"Can we come out?" he asks through the door.

"No," William says.

"It's calm," Ovi says. "Maybe come out only one at a time, though. Send Burky first, then you, and keep Nyles for last."

Nicke opens the door, despite some distinct whimpering behind him, and peeks out. The unicorn is staggering down the hallway, with a couple of what look like feathered darts sticking out of its flank. It's still moving, so it's not down for the count, but it's clearly feeling some effect from it.

"What did you just shoot it with?" Nicke asks, coming all the way out.

"I ask Holtby what horse drugs work, and he ask his sister," Ovi says. "But, most of those, you have to give to horse in neck, so then I ask a friend about drugs for when they have to shoot bears."

"How much drugs did you give it?" Nicke asks, deciding to skip right past the potential conversational morass of when and where and how Ovi got his hands on drugs meant to incapacitate bears.

"Enough to kill you or me," Ovi says. "It'll be fine, probably."

The unicorn sways, and then blips out of existence. It's the first time it's done that while they’ve been watching, and it's strange. No flash of light, no sparkles, and barely any warning. One second it's there, and then the next second it's gone.

"So, you think murdercorn don't approve of Nylander, or he's not real virgin or what?" Ovi asks, though low enough that Andre and William probably can’t hear him. Probably. "Maybe it just doesn’t like his technique."

"I don’t know," Nicke says. "Maybe it's just a real dick."

It's midnight by the time everyone is dressed, bandaged, and downstairs. Nicke apologizes to William twice, and William and Andre stay at least ten feet apart from each other at any given moment. In the kitchen, Ovi is pulling on his jacket.

"I'm gonna drive Nylander back to Leafs hotel," Ovi says. "We gonna come up with story for his ass on the way. It's not so bad, doesn't even need stitch."

"I can drive him," Nicke says, though there's almost nothing he feels less like doing right now than navigating through DC at night with a sinus headache and what he suspects is a very awkward talk with William hanging over his head.

Ovi shakes his head. "Don't go. Stay here. Burky still all freaked out, and we need talk about more stuff when I'm back."

"I don't need—" Nicke says, and then he just feels tired. "I should clean up in here."

"No. Just put Burky in new bedroom. It's good." Ovi looks thoughtful. "But, I can put Nylander on Metro, send him back like that, save time. Probably nothing on fire right now. He get real DC experience."

"Be nice," Nicke warns Ovi under his breath. He reconsiders, and then says, "Be not as mean as I know you are going to be."

"I'm _never _mean," Ovi says. "I'm _very _nice." And then he smiles and jingles his keys within his pocket. "You know where my beds are, Backy. We have sleepover like in old days." He pats Nicke on the shoulder and turns, walking briskly towards the door. "Okay, little Nylander. We gonna make sure you don't get in trouble with Babcock. You hungry? I'm hungry. There's McDonalds on way back, you get whatever you want. I buy it for you. Come on."

William limps his way out after Ovi but not before throwing a few last dejected looks at Nicke, and Nicke does feel immensely guilty. He'll have to find a way to make up for it later, buy him dinner or something. In the meantime, Andre is sulking out on the deck, so Nicke walks out to tell him to come in.

"I hate this," Andre says from where he's huddled up on one of Ovi's deck lounger chairs as soon as Nicke opens the sliding glass door. "I hate it."

Nicke doesn't respond right away. "I know," he finally says, and sits down next to Andre at the end of the lounger. Andre moves his legs back so they don't touch Nicke. Nicke's guilt increases exponentially.

"It's down on the grass," Andre says. "I just. Better be careful."

He can see it from where he's sitting, even in the dark. It's a pale shimmer. From a distance, it looks delicate, ethereal, more like a dream or a vision. He wonders if it's still feeling the effects of the tranquilizer darts.

"Why don't you like magic?" Andre asks suddenly. It takes Nicke off guard.

"It’s not exactly making your life easy right now," Nicke says. "Does it seem very fun or good to you?"

Andre shrugs. "No, but I mean. I know you’re allergic, it probably doesn’t feel good to sneeze or get your headaches or whatever. But you have this… I can't explain it. It's the way you look when you talk about it."

"If you say murder face, I am allowed to hit you," Nicke says.

"No, this isn’t your murder face. It's mostly not your murder face, anyway." Andre says. "You just always look different whenever we talk about it."

Nicke considers lying, and then decides it's just not worth the energy. "Because it frightens me," he says. "Most of the times I've seen it, someone's been getting hurt or bothered because of it. The first time I saw it, and realized it, I was pretty young, and it made an impression." He huffs something out that would be laughter if it didn’t feel so bitter. "You remember Osh and Nisky talking about getting traumatized? I was traumatized. But it wasn’t a movie. It was real."

"When was that?" Andre asks. "What was it?"

"I'll tell you another time," Nicke says. "I don't like talking about it."

"You don’t have to," Andre says, and he darts one hand out to pat Nicke's briefly before he pulls it back. "It's okay."

"I'm not going to let this mess with your life," Nicke says. "Tomorrow I'm going to call someone else. I think they can help."

"It's okay," Andre says again. "I'm kinda glad I didn’t have to actually let William fuck me. Or fuck him."

"Sorry," Nicke says. "I thought—I really thought it wouldn't be as bad since you knew him in Juniors? You always seemed to get along. You should have told me if you really didn't want to. I wouldn't make you."

"No, not like that," Andre says. "He's fine, I guess. And it was my fault, too. Right when we were getting down to it, he told me he wasn’t a complete virgin. I should have just called it off. But he's not bad looking, and I figured since he was, um, a virgin in some ways and not others, it might still count. I guess Charlie didn't agree."

"That little bastard, he told me he was," Nicke says.

"William's wanted _you_ to fuck him since, like, forever," Andre says. "He'd tell you anything for that. He used to moon over you in Juniors. I bet he stole your underwear or whatever so he could jerk off with it when you guys were at Worlds."

"Eurgh," Nicke says, because really, what else can he say. "Come inside," he settles on. "It's cold. We'll figure this out in the morning."

"Are you going to wait up for Ovi?" Andre asks. "Don't go home. You can stay, I can sleep on the couch."

"Ovi has, like, five bedrooms. I think he can loan me one," Nicke says. "I'll leave him a note I'm here, but that I had to lie down. I'm tired."

"Okay," Andre says, and they go inside together. Nicke shuts off most of the lights, sends a text to Ovi that he's staying but he has a headache and if he's asleep, not to wake him, and lies down on one of the beds in the bedroom next to Andre's. He kicks off his jeans and shoes at least, and he means to get up in a few seconds, to properly undress and steal some of Ovi's toothpaste and a toothbrush, but it's like he's being sucked down into a whirlpool of fatigue, just a plummet into darkness. He'll get up in a second. He will.

_He is running and the hounds are barking._

_He is running but not fast enough; there's a painful stitch in his side. It's dark. It's dark except for the white flashes of the dogs running in the night, behind him and sometimes beside him. They’re so close he can hear them whining. There are no other sounds in the night except the whining and barking and his own hard breathing. His breath is a mist in front of him; the day was warm but the night is so cold now, and the weather has turned._

_Faster, faster._

_A rock turns under his foot and he goes down hard, barely catching himself with both hands and then launching up to his feet again. His palms are raw and stinging, scraped bloody from the ground but he runs on. He has no direction in mind and no plan, he simply runs. _

_Someone is laughing, someone howls like the dogs and urges them on. Fur brushes against his leg and he lurches away, feeling the snap of teeth just missing. Faster, faster._

_Something in front of him, something shining. Water. He needs to reach the water. If he can get across it, he'll be safe. He's running and he comes out of the woods into the open air and the stream is in front of him and he hurls himself towards it with the last sobbing breath of air in his lungs—_

Nicke wakes with a jerk. For a few seconds he lies in the dark, disoriented and unsure of where he is. His heart pounds in his chest. After a few minutes, the terror from the dream begins to fade. He sits up on the bed and scrubs his hands over his face, then fumbles for his phone on the bedside table. 3:07 AM. He should just go back to sleep, if he can.

Something creaks in the hallway. Someone is walking through the hallway outside.

Nicke freezes and listens. Silence, and then another slight creak. It's probably just Andre or Ovi. But he can't help but feel uneasy. He gets up off the bed and eases himself over to the door. He listens for another footfall, but he hears… music? Something faint and far away, not in the house, but like it's coming from outside.

He strains to hear it better and can barely catch the delicate notes of it. It's pretty. Another creak, and then another, and Nicke opens his door to see Andre shuffling past, blankfaced and looking more asleep than awake. His eyes are half-closed and he's barefoot and in shorts and a t-shirt.

"Andre?" he says.

Andre doesn't react or respond. He just walks slowly to the staircase, puts one hand on it, and starts clomping down, one step at a time. Nicke watches him, unease growing stronger with every second.

"Andre. What are you doing? Wake up," he hisses. Andre just keeps going.

Nicke curses and ducks back into his bedroom, groping on the floor for his pants and shoes. It only takes a few seconds, but Andre's already gotten to the bottom of the stairs by then. Nicke thrusts one leg into his jeans and nearly loses his balance hopping as he gets into the other. He bangs once on Ovi's bedroom door as he stumbles past, and then he takes the stairs two at a time. The front door is open; Andre is slipping through it.

"Nicke? What's wrong?" Ovi's at the top of the stairs in nothing but boxer briefs, looking sleepy and confused.

Nicke jerks a thumb towards the door. "Something's wrong with Andre. Get down here."

He shoves his feet into his shoes, doesn’t bother lacing them, and races out the door. The sound of music is stronger out here, a lilting melody that sounds like several different instruments playing together at once, pipes and strings and brass all winding together and around each other like there's some unseen orchestra playing. Andre's already more than halfway down Ovi's front drive, heading directly for the front gates. The unicorn is walking just in front of him. It's glowing gently in the night, _actually _glowing, a silvery shimmer.

And there's someone standing just outside the front gates, a tall figure in the shadows, utterly still and waiting as Andre walks towards it.

Nicke can't make out anything except the general height and shape. There's nothing _overtly _threatening about whoever it is, except for the whole eerie unseen music and the lurking in the fucking shadows at three in the morning, and he runs faster. Andre's already at the front gate, leaning against it with both hands wrapped around two of the bars and with the unicorn standing directly beside him. Andre's tall, but whoever this is is tall enough that Andre has to tilt his face up to look at them. There's a rapturous expression on his face, and his lips are moving.

"Hey!" Nicke yells loudly as he sprints up. "Get away from him!"

Andre's not asleep but he looks dreamy and unfocused, eyes fixed on whoever it is, but he doesn't resist as Nicke pelts up and physically yanks him back and away from the gate. It's not until he's pulled Andre more than an arm's length away that he looks properly at whoever's out there, and when he does, it's like a physical blow, and he grunts. The smell of patchouli hits him in a blast and his eyes water; he can barely breathe. He sneezes explosively, and gags for breath.

The strange man is tall and pale, with high cheekbones and eyes as entirely black and wide as the unicorn's. His hair is shoulder-length and white with a silver shimmer to it, also like the unicorn, but he doesn't look old. He looks inhumanly beautiful, and Nicke can't think of any other word that fits. He's beautiful in a way it hurts to look at because it's so unlike what it should be. It's _off,_ and his mind skitters over what his eyes try to show him; he has no way to describe it as a whole. He tries to focus on specific things, like the fine-boned hand that hovers just beyond the bars of the gate, towards which Andre had been tilting his face. The curve of his pale lips, smiling. A narrow aquiline nose, straight and never broken.

All of those things conspire to great and terrible beauty but it’s not that which makes Nicke feel like dropping to his knees, not exactly. It's that in comparison he feels pathetic and filthy, skin filmed all over with dirt and sweat that he never washed off from early this evening; he's gross and dripping with snot and nothing in comparison. Those dark, inhuman eyes meet and bore into his, and he's small and insignificant, just one more ant running around on the ground, no triumphs, no real victories or accomplishments to speak of. His tongue is thick and his voice is a stuttering, discordant bray. He's nothing. He's dust. He's a coward living in a shadow; he's a bug skittering under rocks and rotting leaves and he needs to crawl away into nothing, he is nothing, he is—

Something brushes against his arm. Something warm and solid.

"You're intruding," Ovi says from right next to him, and suddenly he's himself again, the stranger's eyes snapped away from his and he's free from that horrible black gaze.

Ovi shifts closer to him. Ovi is warm. Ovi's hair is flat on one side and sticking up on the other; Ovi is wearing a pair of gray sweats with the black band of his briefs peeking out, crocs on his feet with no shirt on, and pointing the iron fire poker at the stranger with one hand and holding what looks like a plastic bag of onion bagels in the other. There are reddened lines on his face from where he was sleeping on his pillow funny. He looks familiar and ridiculous and rumpled and human, the complete opposite of the stranger facing them on the other side of the gate, and Nicke soaks it in like warmth from a fire.

Ovi pushes Andre behind both him and Nicke, and they stand shoulder to shoulder, staring at the man. Ovi hands Nicke the poker and just touching the iron makes his mind clear up completely, his strength coming back like a second wind.

"This is my house," Ovi says flatly to the stranger. "You're not welcome here."

"I am only here to collect what's mine," the man says, finally speaking. His voice is low but perfectly clear, an accent that Nicke can’t place and it lingers in the air like a bell that's been rung. "Something was taken from me, and now it must be returned. I have fair rights and claim to it."

The unicorn steps forward to the gate. Nicke watches it kneel, going down on its front legs with its head bowing towards the ground.

"Ah, my pet," the man says to the unicorn. "Have you enjoyed frolicking in this dingy little world? Have you missed the green meadows and golden woods of home you were stolen from? You shall return now, and run under the moon and stars once again, and let their light shine down on you."

"If the unicorn is yours, we didn't steal it from you," Ovi says. Nicke realizes that Ovi also sounds different, and his mind wrestles over it again, trying to figure out why.

"It is of my lands and it came into your world, called forth by spell," the man says. "A unicorn is priceless and you sought to rob me. I who command the twenty-nine profane legions, and raised the Glass Tower in one twilight, and rule the red land from the dawn mountains to the sea of night?"

"Whatever, Judge Judy," Ovi says. "I've won the Hart and the Lindsey three times. I've won the Rocket _six _times. You’re still not coming inside." He turns slightly, and rips open the bag of bagels. "Here, Burky. Hold this."

He shoves one into Andre's hands, and Andre slowly tightens his grip on it. Nicke can smell garlic and onions, and it’s somehow comforting. It's earthy and ordinary. Maybe Andre feels the same way, because he lifts it to his face and then looks around, awake but confused. "We're outside?" he asks, and shivers. He doesn't have socks or shoes on, Nicke notices with a pang.

"We didn’t cast the spell which brought it here," Nicke says. "It wasn't our doing. You can take the unicorn back with you, but we didn't steal from you."

Behind them, Andre speaks, slow and slurred, like someone who's just woken up. "His name is Charlie."

And now he realizes—Ovi sounds different and Andre sounds different and his own mind and ears are wrestling with what's coming out of his mouth because they're speaking something else and it’s not English. He can understand them, and he can understand the man, and it’s paradoxically comprehensible and also disorienting.

"We aren't trying to keep the unicorn," Nicke says. He focuses on a point just beyond the man, because it’s easier not to look at him straight on. It's probably an illusion, but the trees seem to bend down closer to the man every time he speaks. "We haven't tried to prevent it from returning to you."

"You surround it in cold iron," the man murmurs. He continues to stay just beyond the bars, never touching them. It's a little bit of comfort to Nicke to realize. "Hardly free."

"That didn't stop it from terrorizing half the team in Kettler," Nicke says. "The fence didn't keep it here. It was capable of leaving."

"Oh? Perhaps it stayed for other reasons, then," the man says. Nicke doesn't like the expression on his face at all. It’s sly and amused, far too knowing. "Perhaps it sought company…" His eyes flicker past Nicke and Ovi and settle firmly on Andre. Nicke instinctively steps even closer to Ovi to close ranks and block Andre from that greedy gaze. Ovi leans into him, sensing the effort and Nicke takes his arm. "Perhaps it sought worthy treasure in other places."

"What's your name?" Nicke asks, a last-ditch effort. You can do damage with a true name; his grandmother had told him this once. You have power over something if you know its true name.

The man—no, this is not a man; this is as much a man as the unicorn is a horse—smiles patiently, indulgently even, as if he recognizes the ploy for what it is but is still amused by it. "I suppose I've had many names," he says. "You may call me Amduscias."

Nicke's mouth shapes the syllables but doesn't release them. He keeps his grip on Ovi's arm to ground himself. It feels bitterly cold outside, too cold for even just the late fall night. He can see his breath steaming in the air, from Andre and Ovi as well, but not the stranger.

"But you must repay me in kind," Amduscias says. "Give me your names, my hosts. Give me fair trade."

"You can call me Backy," Nicke says. He digs his nails into Ovi's arm and wills him to understand.

'My name—" Ovi starts, and then stops. "You can call me Ovi," he says. Nicke relaxes fractionally.

"You can call him—" he starts, but Amduscias shakes his head and waves one white languid hand towards Andre.

"Andre has already freely given me his name when I asked it of him, you see," Amduscias says.

His smile is as sickle-sharp as the moon in the sky above them. Nicke remembers the shining look of bedazzlement in Andre's eyes as he'd stood by the gate, his moving lips. Horror creeps over him, but he can't let it show.

"He is the reason my unicorn slipped from my world to yours. He drank a libation to seal his bond with it. He waits for a lover's hand to claim him. He has given me his name," Amduscias says. "I have the right to him, and he is mine as well, now."

"The fuck he is," Ovi says.

"You can't have him," Nicke says.

"Oh, but I can," Amduscias says, eyes shining. "And truly, it will be his honor to sit as consort at my side. He's young and not so unpleasing to the eye, after all. Normally we see mortals as nothing but our tithe that we pay to the flames. But every so often, there are those who shine like jewels, and we give them proper decorative placement."

He moves closer to the bars of the gates. His voice is as soft and caressing as velvet. "Come with me, my beloved, and I will open my world to you, and show you pleasures you couldn’t possibly imagine. Nothing but silk and jewels will drape your skin, and I will lay you down on a bed of a thousand delights. You will want for nothing and leave no desire unsatisfied as long as you are by my side. The memory of this world will pass away like dust, and all will be shining and bright."

For a few seconds, Andre looks like there's a part of him that's _actually considering it_, like there's something appealing about being carried off in the middle of the night by a creepy hot weirdo with pointed ears and nice hair. But when Amduscias smiles, it shows all his teeth. They're pointed and sharp, a mouth full of needles. Nicke hears Andre suck his breath in slightly, and then he shakes his head.

"There's your answer. Fuck off, asshole," Ovi says. Amduscias moves in a flash, up against the bars as close as he can come without touching, and he locks eyes with Ovi the same way he did with Nicke when Nicke had first come running to the gate. The fear and shame in himself compared to whatever Amduscias is—demon, elf, fairy, whatever—swells up again, but Ovi catches the brunt.

Ovi grunts like he's taken a blindside hit on the boards, eyes screwing shut and going down to one knee, and Nicke knows exactly what he's seeing and feeling: the worst parts of all himself and all his failures, the stinking sweat from every loss, the bitterness of useless adrenaline from trying but coming up short yet again, blood in the mouth, broken nose and missing teeth, ugly, scarred, unworthy, unsuccessful and how fucking _dare_ he, _how fucking dare he make Ovi feel that way_, look at Ovi like he's worthless or insignificant.

That anger overwhelms the fear; Nicke seizes it, leans into it, and he can move again. The cold dread and the clinging mental muck of the shame dries up and recedes back in the heat of his anger, and he steps in front of Ovi protectively, and hits the poker against the bars of the gate. Metal clashes on metal with a noise that could wake the dead, and Amduscias steps back—_stumbles_ back, though it's just a small misstep.

Behind him, Nicke can heard Ovi breathing hard and ragged, like the first day of camp and doing suicide sprints up and down the ice. But then he steps up next to Nicke's side again. Nicke takes a deep breath.

"The unicorn is yours and we don't want to put any claim on it. But you can't have Andre," Nicke says. Every word has to be carefully considered now. He has to say this correctly and with no chance for error. "He belongs here, and we'll fight you for him. That's our right."

"As you say," Amduscias says. "If you set your claim to keep him against mine to take him, we will resolve this in… a traditional way. I will revoke my right of claim to him and leave you all in peace and without harm if you can bring three champions who may also claim rights to him and defeat three challenges I set before you. Tomorrow at midnight, we will meet here."

"What challenges?" Nicke asks sharply.

"Oh, the usual," Amduscias says. "Guile. Courage. And strength. Mind you well, though. Your chosen champions must truly be able to claim their right to stand for him by kin or court rank or other suitable bond. And of course, their lives are forfeit if they fail the challenge."

"Listen to the way you talk," Ovi says, and shakes his head. "I'm gonna fight you just for that."

"Charming," Amduscias says. "Three tasks. Three champions. And we will see who wins the prize."

He steps back into shadows still smiling, and then he disappears, just like the unicorn's done. For an instant, Nicke thinks the smile lingers while the rest is gone, like the Cheshire Cat from _Alice in Wonderland._ The unicorn is also gone, hopefully for good. But now they have an exponentially worse problem on their hands.

"I'm sorry," Andre says, looking cold and miserable. He rubs his hands up and down his arms like he's trying to brush something away; Nicke understands. Listening to that voice made him feel like bugs were crawing over his skin. "I fucked up."

"You didn’t know," Nicke says. "It's all right. It's going to be all right. Let's get back in the house."

"You think we let him take you anywhere?" Ovi says. "No fucking chance, Burky. Come on, Backy's right, let's go back to house, it’s too cold out here. Anyway, we got worse problem to figure out than how to win against creepy elf stalker."

"What?" Burky asks.

"How we gonna reschedule Halloween party," Ovi says.

***

This is the only season where they have used The Word more than twice, and that includes the calamitous 2013-2014 season where Sochi happened, Ovi's dad happened, Nicke's drug test happened, they missed the playoffs, and Joel Ward got stuck in a bathroom stall in Dallas. Nicke's not entirely sure he would trade 2013-2014 for what's happening now; no one was getting stabbed or potentially claimed as a consort for a dark fairy lord or some bullshit back then, but 2013-2014 was still a real pain in the ass.

Three emergency Surfer Birds within the first month of a season is still a record, though. If they all survive this and Andre doesn't get dragged off to another crazy fairy dimension, they'll have to commemorate it appropriately. Maybe some kind of addition to the post-game victory LED motorcycle helmet.

Nicke is running on very little sleep, but he checks his watch, does some mental math, pulls out his phone, and makes a phone call he should have made a while ago. When his grandmother answers, he doesn't waste time with pleasantries.

"Granny," he says. "I have trouble. The kind from when I was young and we were in Höglunda. I need your advice."

His grandmother doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then she sighs. Her voice sounds tired. "What's happened?"

"It was an accident. One of my teammates attracted the attention of—someone. Something. He calls himself Amduscias. It wasn’t his fault, there was a girl who tried to do some stupid love spell and somehow, she managed to… I'm not even sure, rip a hole or open a door between this place and some other world where there are unicorns and people who look like they came out of a Lord of the Rings movie."

It never stops sounding stupid, Nicke mentally marvels to himself. At least his grandmother's had some experience with that.

"Probably Fae," she says. "Or something of that type. I think this isn't too uncommon. There's enough old stories so that some of it must be based on truth that's trickled in."

"I don’t think that's his real name," Nicke says. "But the problem is, the unicorn came through first, and it's done some kind of magic on my teammate and been hanging around him for the last month, attacking nearly everyone who even touched him and trying to make him be… intimate with. Er. Virgins."

"What a problem to have," his grandmother says. "I assume there's more."

"And now last night, this fae person shows up and says we’ve stolen his unicorn, and he's gotten Andre to tell him his name and now he wants to take him off to God knows where to have his way with him," Nicke says. "Though he also said something about a tithe to the flames. So, I don't think it'll end well."

"What else did you notice about him?" his grandmother asks.

"He was hard to look at," Nicke says. "Like… a glamour. He wasn't human. And there was music playing, almost like it came from the trees. And when he looked at me, or at any of us, we felt… terrible. Disgusting. Like we were so dirty and awful in comparison. It was horrible, it felt like drowning and all you can think of is how much you hate yourself for even existing next to him. But iron kept him out, and I think it would hurt him."

"What happened next?"

"I told him we would fight him for Andre to keep him with us, and he said if we could bring three champions to beat his three challenges, he would revoke his claim and leave us in peace. I agreed. It was all I could think of to do." Nicke sighs. "He's coming back here tomorrow at midnight. Well, technically tonight. You know what I mean."

"Oh Nicklas," his grandmother says. Her voice is tired and slow. "I should have told you more," she says. "You were a child. I should have armed you better against things like this. But you were just a child. I wanted you to forget and grow away from it."

Nicke thinks she's never forgiven herself. He's tried to tell her that shouldn't blame herself, but the words stick in his throat most of the time whenever he has to remember. One summer vacationing away, and she'd told him to be home by nightfall. And instead he wandered directly into the path of some wild hunt—fucking Odin, Nicke had refused to watch _American Gods _on Starz purely out of spite—and came away with a lifelong fear of dogs and a desire to stay out of the woods and on the ice rink.

What he thinks he needs to make clear to her is that in the end, it didn’t matter. He could have just as easily been chased by regular dogs and come away the same; all it’s done is given him more awareness—and more fear—of what's out in the shadows. But there's no time now. There's never any time for the long heartfelt conversations like they have in the movies and shows. Life rarely has an even narrative flow.

"It's done, Granny," he says. "I'm still alive. I was stupid and stayed out too late one night, and I had a terrible scare because of it. But it’s not so bad. I'm all right. Maybe it changed my life, but I'm doing okay anyway. But now I have to help someone else and I need to know if you know anything that I can do to win and help him. Because I've been pretending none of this exists for a long time, and I haven't thought enough about it to learn where I can have an edge."

She is quiet again for a moment. It seems to Nicke that this is a kind of magic in itself, that her voice can be sent thousands over miles over the ocean and through the air to him to hear. The world is full of marvels, no matter how much the Fae lord had sneered at it.

"I don’t have much. I'm just an old woman who has read a lot of stories and listens to other old people talk about their stories. You learn what can hurt you, and what the basic things are that can kill or stop them, by fire or water or just cutting it into small enough pieces."

"I've already got an iron fire poker," he says, only half joking.

"You need to be cautious," she said firmly. "Be honest but do not give anything more than you have to. There will be rules, but there are ways to get around them. I think, most importantly, if he says he is coming back to you, you will be operating in the rules of this world. So use this world's weapons, Nicklas. A fire poker might be stronger than expected. Play to your strengths."

"All right," Nicke says. "I love you, Granny. I'll talk to you again soon."

The next person he calls is Brooks.

"I know you’re coming to Ovi's. Before you come, I need you to make a list of everything in your books that could help and and bring everything you can on it," he says.

He should call his parents and brother after that, but Nicke is running short on time. He'll have to hope it won't be necessary. By the time he gets in his car to head over to Ovi's house, it's already further into the afternoon than he'd like.

Ovi doesn't order pizza this time; he just makes a call with his credit card and reroutes what Nicke suspects is someone else's fancy catered event (it includes a cake that says CONGRATULATIONS JAMES AND JULIE in elaborate script) to his own house, and also gets about half a liquor store delivered, and does shot after shot with Andre until the rest of the team shows up. Everyone's on their way, but Grubi is the one who shows up first, and he has some kind of bulky ancient-looking camera in hand; he pulls Nicke into the kitchen to show him.

"I don't know if we should or should not," he says. "But I finally got my cousin's friend to agree to send me this camera from her collection. It's not the magical realism one, but it's supposed to show hidden things."

"What does that mean?" Nicke says.

Grubi shrugs. "She says it's similar to the magical realism camera. But that it shows, uh. Well, she said she's pretty sure she's photographed a couple ghosts with it. And apparently a dog."

"A dog ghost?"

"No, a missing dog," Grubi says. "It was her dog, it was alive. It had gotten lost a few weeks before. She was using it for pictures on the street, and the dog was in it, and she said she knew he was alive. She took pictures all up and down the street and it would show up in the pictures, though it had a hurt foot. And eventually she found it again, and it looked like it did in the pictures, same injury."

"So, we take a picture of Andre and then, what, we see the unicorn?" Nicke asks. "It doesn't really matter, now. It hasn't been around all day."

Nicke is fairly sure it's back with Amduscias. Andre's noticed its absence as well; Nicke's noticed him glancing around expectantly, and then looking disappointed.

Grubi blows his breath out. "I don't know. But I told her it was an emergency, and it can't hurt. I want to see what it shows us with him."

Andre is in Ovi's basement's main recreational room, curled up on the couch in an amazingly small ball for someone who's so tall and lanky, and wrapped around Ovi's dog since the unicorn's gone AWOL. Ovi is on his other side, cuddling him for all he's worth. Andre looks up at them blearily and piteously as they show up, and then partially unfolds himself and nudges Ovi. "Another one."

"Save some for when team show up," Ovi says, but he pours another two shots, and under Nicke's implicit direction by eyebrow, covertly waters down one of them considerably and then hands it to Andre. Andre tosses it back, and then curls up again with the dog. Ovi pats him, and looks like he's going to get up, but Nicke motions at him to sit still.

"Grubi's going to try something," he says. "You should stay there."

Grubi raises the camera up to his face. "Look at me, both of you," he says. "No, wait, fix the light, Backy. Turn it a little that way. That's better. Actually, Backy, you get in it, too."

Nicke nudges Ovi's dog aside gingerly, and then sits down next to Andre, forcing him to move to the middle of the couch. He pokes him. "Sit up. This is important."

Andre grumbles, but gets himself to a position that's more upright than horizontal. He sits leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, bracing himself. Ovi spreads his arms over the back of the couch. "If you give me rabbit ears, I will punch you," Nicke promises, without looking. He folds his own hands in his lap, trying to keep his grimace internal.

Grubi snaps the picture, and the camera spits a polaroid out. Grubi delicately holds it by one corner and lets it develop. "You shouldn't actually shake these," he tells them seriously. "It can cause problems while it's still developing. Just let it happen."

Nicke can see the picture swimming up from the depths of the developing film, light and dark resolving into an image. Grubi tilts it and looks at it, holding it close, then farther away, and then bringing it back in close again.

"Oh," he says, brow furrowed. "Um. Hmm. That's… different."

"Is there murdercorn in it?" Ovi asks.

"No…" Grubi says hesitantly, which means _something's _up. He holds the picture out, and Nicke takes it from him. They all lean in to look.

At first, he stares, trying to figure it out. There's the couch, and there's them. Ovi is there, and Nicke is as well, and they look—fairly normal, though there's a bit of a light halo around them. It's a little like the first picture Nicke tried to take of the unicorn on his first time seeing it, so maybe he was right and it is something supernatural. But that's nothing compared to the rest of the picture which is Andre, who is—there's no way around it, looking at the picture—_glowing_. He's not just light-limned, he looks as though there's light under his _skin_, like he's been dipped in gold.

And Andre is flanked in the picture. But not just by Ovi and Nicke.

Standing behind the couch, there's something behind and on his left. It's like a shadow at first, deep and dark, but it doesn't take much squinting to look like a human figure. The longer Nicke stares at it, the more it looks like the shape of a tall person with a hand resting on Andre's shoulder. There's something proprietary and awful about it, especially the way Andre is unaware and isn't reacting in the picture. There was no shadow like that when Nicke was adjusting the lights; he's sure of it, and anyway, it shouldn't even be there with the way he and Ovi are lit, and the way Andre is.

And the way Christian is. Who is also in the picture, despite definitely _not _being present in the room right now or when it was taken, and is standing to the right, on Andre's other side.

Andre, Ovi, and Nicke are all looking at the camera straight on; Christian's head is turned so that he's looking at Andre. His arm is stretched out a little towards Andre, but it's not touching him like the shadow is. He's glowing a little, not as bright as Andre, but not dark like the shadow. He looks—happy, Nicke thinks. Christian's not the grinning type, but Nicke knows him well enough to see the smile in his eyes as well, just a little crinkled at the corners. He's looking directly at Andre and smiling, reaching out but not yet touching.

"What the fuck," Ovi says, and looks around. "How'd Djooser get in the pic? He's not here?"

Nicke shakes his head, and they all look at each other. Grubi, Ovi, and Andre all look as bewildered as he feels, though something drops out of the bottom of his stomach when Grubi says, "He's not… Djooser's not a ghost. He's fine. He's alive."

"He just scored a goal, like, recently," Nicke says. And now this, _this _is now the most useless thing he's ever said.

"Why would he be a ghost?" Andre demands. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The camera," Grubi says, still looking a little lost. "It's a magic one, from my friend. It's supposed to show hidden things, I asked so we could see the unicorn and maybe anything else useful. But she said it could show ghosts?"

"Djooser's dead? Shit. Not good," Ovi says. He frowns. "Maybe it's like Bruce Willis, you know, in creepy little kid sees dead people ghost movie?"

"Christian's not a fucking ghost," Andre says. "Like, uh, what Nicke said. He scored a goal. He _eats._ He ate my powerbar yesterday. Everyone sees him."

"The dog was alive in the pictures," Nicke says to Grubi. "You told me the dog was fine."

"Wait, what dog?" Ovi asks, looking down at Blake with concern. "Dog's not okay?"

"Do you think it's an omen?" Grubi asks. "Has anyone noticed, like. Has he said anything recently on the groupchat?"

They all have their phones out by then, and they're all scrolling, except for Nicke who's gone straight to calling, and it's ringing and ringing and no one is picking up. Nicke doesn't bother leaving a voicemail once it clicks over; he just disconnects and starts calling again. It rings and rings; it's echoing in his ear, except it's _really _echoing, he can hear it outside the room, and—

Christian walks into the room, holding his still-ringing phone. "Sorry, I was parking, and then I figured I'd just come down," he said. "What's up?"

"You're okay?" Nicke says.

"You're not Bruce Willis ghost?" Ovi says.

"Uh, yes. No. Sorry?" Christian offers, looking worried.

"Oh my God, you're not dead!" Andre yells, and launches himself across the room and into Christian's arms; Christian goes down in a heap with a startled grunt under Andre's weight. He makes a higher pitched noise of surprise as Andre immediately shoves one hand up under Christian's shirt and the other into his hair, patting him all over. "I can touch him, he's here! He's not a ghost."

"I don't think so?" Christian says, somewhat muffled under Andre wrapping himself around him and doing his best to actually wrestle or squirm his way inside Christian's clothes, from what Nicke can tell. "Oh, I. Uh. Um, hi. Oh. Fuck."

There's some more squirming, and somehow Christian emerges on top, looking disheveled and flushed, Andre flat on his back and spread out beneath him "Fuck," Christian says one more time, and then he lays both hands along either side of Andre's neck, slides them all the way up to cup his face like it's something invaluably precious, takes a deep breath, bends down, and kisses him—not hard, not forcefully, but deeply and thoroughly.

Nicke has a few seconds to think he does it with the same smoothness he skates with and be distantly impressed by it; Christian angles their faces just enough so that they don't collide noses, easing himself down so that they twine together flat, and he's not hunched over. When he looks away from them, Grubi and Ovi are looking back at him, both of them just as bemused as Nicke feels.

Grubi raises the camera and takes another picture. The pop and flash does seem to filter through to Andre and Christian, and they stop making out long enough to look back at Nicke and the others, and blink. Nicke watches Christian visibly battle something internally, before he leans down and stares in Andre's eyes with an intensity that makes Nicke look away, before rolling off him and then reaching a hand over to help Andre sit up.

"Look," Grubi says, and hands Nicke the picture he just took. Nick looks at it. In the picture, it's Christian and Andre just as they were a moment ago, stretched out and wrapped up in each other, and Andre is still lit by that weird golden glow, but Christian is glowing just as brightly. There's a shadow behind Andre, but it's not as close as before.

Nicke hands the picture to Ovi, and then faces the kids. The time for diplomacy is long past.

"Are you a virgin?" he asks Christian.

Christian's face is slowly going from pink to red, but he manages to keep eye contact with Nicke. "Um. Yeah."

"_Really_?" Andre and Ovi both say.

"Really," Grubi says, though it sounds much less surprised than the rest of them. Grubi's probably played the most games alongside Christian while with the Bears, Nicke thinks.

"Why haven't you been getting whammied by the unicorn and trying to jump Andre for the last month?" Nicke says.

"I mean, I _wanted_ to," Christian says. "I _really _wanted to. But I kinda, I've always wanted to? Before the unicorn was even around, though?"

"You did?" Andre said, scooting closer.

"Well, yeah," Christian says. "I thought. I thought I was really obvious and you were just being polite by ignoring it."

"Djooser, you’re great d-man, but you're like Backy and no one ever gonna say you're too obvious with emotions," Ovi says.

"You should have told me," Andre says. "But Charlie never poked you, did he? Shit, I should have noticed."

"Are we meeting down here?" Bowey asks, coming down the basement stairs. "Oh. Hey. Did Djooser finally tell Burky? Good for you, Djooser. Way to finally shoot your shot."

"_You_ knew too?" Andre asks. "Why does everyone know? Am I bad at this?"

Bowey shrugs. "Gotta talk about something on the bus rides down in Hershey."

By the time Andre and Christian have gotten off the floor and are sitting next to each other on the couch, the rest of the team is arriving. Everyone gets waved to wherever they can find a seat, and Nicke lays out the events of last night as quickly and concisely as possible.

"So, three of us are going to do… whatever the challenge is," he finishes. "As champions. We don't know what's going to have to be done, only that they're supposed to involve guile, courage, and strength. I'm going to be one of them."

"And me. I'm also gonna do it," Ovi says immediately and with no room for argument in his voice. "I'm captain."

"We're not going to make anyone—" Nicke starts to say and Willy interrupts him immediately. "I want to. Me. Pick me."

"No, I'll do it," Devo says.

"I can help, I can do it," Holtby says.

"I have the other A. It should be me," Brooks says. And every single person on the team starts to shout out and volunteer at once, and Nicke thinks his heart could break with all the affection for them, and also the fear that he's going to get them killed.

Ovi is yelling for everyone to shut up and quiet down, and when they eventually do, Christian stands up. "Me. I'm doing it. I love him and I'm a virgin and I'm just—I'm going to do it. Don't laugh at me. Okay, thanks."

Uproar commences again.

There's almost an hour of arguing, and suggestions for deciding, ranging from deciding based on NHL points, to numbers pulled out of Holtby's hat, to rock-paper-scissors. Eventually, when none of them will budge, and Christian just folds his arms and sets his jaw, they reluctantly accept it. Brooks brings out a sack of everything he's apparently looked up that might in some possible way help or defend them against whatever supernatural forces are in play here and starts decking them out.

"Iron. Crosses. Iron crosses. Bag of salt. Bread. Holy water. Holly. Rowan twigs. Bells. You probably should all turn your clothes inside out. Horse shoe, horse shoe, horse shoe. I bought some four-leaf clovers, too," Brooks mutters. "I'm gonna pin this marigold here; there's a corsage for each of you..."

"I'm gonna feed Blake before we go," Ovi says, and slips off upstairs. Nicke goes to the bathroom to undress and turn his clothes inside out to satisfy Brooks; when he comes back, Christian's in the middle of a group where Willy is trying to give him a crash course in idenitfiying the best places to punch someone while using Walker as a model, and Beags is doing something to Christian's jacket and tucking something inside it, and Brooks is shaking out a handful of St. John's Wort pills into his palm.

"Use this world's weapons," he says out loud, remembering.

"What?" Brooks says, looking up. "Yeah. Let’s cover all the bases. Here’s some garlic, too. Remember, if you have to wrestle a bear or a tiger or some fire or whatever, it's probably just an illusion. Close your eyes if you have to."

"That's probably good advice for anyone," Ovi says, coming back down the stairs.

And then there's nothing to do but wait.

Everyone on the team refuses to leave. At five minutes to midnight, they're all still there. Ovi and Nicke and Andre and Christian start their walk down the driveway to the front gate, accompanied by the entire team like the world's weirdest parade. Christian is actually clinking as he walks, hung down with so many things by Brooks. Nicke has the fire poker. Ovi has the skillet. When they reach the front gates, they all pause and wait.

"What happens next?" Holtby says. "Wait. Is that music playing? Where’s the music coming from?"

And then everything goes black.

When Nicke comes to, he's sprawled on the grass and Ovi and Christian are next to him. Andre's nowhere to be seen, and Nicke struggles to his feet. When he looks behind him, he sees what looks like Ovi's front gates, but in front of him is a dirt path that leads up a hill that certainly wasn’t in front of Ovi's house and street before. It’s horribly disorienting, looking back and forth between the two places. He can't see the team through Ovi's gates, but he doesn't want to chance stepping back through to check. When he looks back, Ovi and Christian are up and joining him.

"Are we still on earth?" Christian asks. "We're not, like. In his place or whatever? With the glass tower, you said? You said he said he was coming back to you."

"We're still here," Ovi says. "It's just hill in the dog park where I bring Blake sometimes. Huh." He looks around. "I guess we go up to the overlook," Ovi says after a moment, so they do.

The hill isn't too steep, but it's a climb. At the top, it tapers off into a flatter surface, more like a plateau. There are trees, hung with twinkling lights, and the unseen music is playing again, tinkling brightly in counterpoint to the lights. There's no breeze or wind, but the tree branches seem to wave and bend gently to the music regardless of that. The air smells of flowers.

The unicorn is there. So is Amduscias, on a fucking _throne_ in the middle of it all, which is actually a regular park bench wound all over with vines and flowers when Nicke looks closer. Andre's there too, sitting at the feet of Amduscias, wearing a wreath of flowers around his neck, having his hair stroked like a fucking dog, and looking very unhappy about it all. Anger boils up inside him, and Nicke raises the poker and points it. "Stop touching him. We're here."

"The champions arrive," Amduscias says jovially. He's easier to see now. He's wearing what looks like—some kind of fancy shimmery tunic with a breastplate over it, and a dark red cloak hanging off the back. He has a delicate crown that spikes upwards with what looks like thin blades resting on his head. "Shall we begin the trials?"

Nicke ignores him. "Andre, are you all right?" he calls out.

Andre looks shaken but in one piece. He swats at Amduscias's hand and leans away. "Yeah."

"Then we can begin the challenge of guile," Amduscias says.

"Remember," Nicke whispered in a low voice to Christian and Ovi. "No real names. Be careful of what you say. Play to your strengths. Cheat if you can."

In a louder voice, he says, "Who's going to judge all these? Not you."

"Not me," Amduscias agrees. "A fair judge. Who better to decide purity of spirit?"

The unicorn trots up and snorts. Nicke stares at it. "Don't forget, we let you have pizza," he says.

"The champion may come forward," Amduscias announces, and then points to Ovi. "You."

"Me?" Ovi says. "Uh, wait."

"Wait, we get to choose," Nicke says. "I'm the one for guile."

"That was not part of the rules," Amduscias says smugly. "We must use the weapons and skills at our disposal." And before Nicke can threaten him with the poker, he waves his hand and Andre is next to him. And next to Christian. And Ovi. Three identical Andres all blank faced and motionless, frozen as still as statues. "Find your friend amidst the illusions. Choose the right one. Or die. It's all the same to me. I'd rather get this over sooner; I have a feast to attend, and a consort to introduce to my realm. "

Ovi makes a thoughtful grunt. "Oh. That's all?" He looks over at Amduscias. "Can I touch them?"

"It wouldn’t do any harm," Amduscias smirks. "But no."

"Fine," Ovi says. He walks over to Backy. "Come with me," he says, and gently tugs him by one arm over to the Andre standing by Christian. He urges Nicke forward until he and Andre are nearly nose to nose. Andre looks through him, not at him, which is unsettling. After a few seconds, the inside of Nicke's nose itches and he sneezes, jerking back as to not spray it all over Andre's face.

"Now him," Ovi says, and it’s on to the Andre standing where Ovi had been. Again, Ovi guides them until they’re standing as close together as possible. By now, Nicke has the idea and he leans in and takes a deep breath. Again, the back of his throat tingles immediately, and his nose itches and he sneezes.

"And last," he says, and Nicke walks back over to where the last Andre stands, who had appeared beside him. He breathes in and waits. Nothing. He waits longer, just to be sure, but there's just a little bit of itching, barely anything in comparison to the first two. He has no real urge to sneeze, no horrible patchouli scent.

Ovi points. "That's him," he says. The unicorn trots over and touches its horn gently to that Andre's hand and it lights up with a golden flow. Andre jerks and takes a step aside; the other two copies vanish.

"I hope that's smart and fast enough," Ovi says, staring back at Amduscias, and then lifting the skillet and resting it on his shoulder. "We doing the next one now?"

Amduscias's mouth is a thin line. "The first challenge is complete. The champion is victorious. We will move on to courage. But first, for security's purpose—"

He snaps his fingers and a ring of light springs up around Andre. Andre touches it with one hand, and then jerks it back, hissing. "I'm fine," he calls back to Nicke and the others. "It's just cold. Keep going. I want to get back in time for the Halloween party."

"Courage," Amduscias says, staring at them. "Shall we begin?"

And by now, Nicke knows better than to hope Christian will get it and not be left to figure out strength. Christian, who probably doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds soaking wet. Sure enough, Amduscias points at Nicke. He steps forward. "What's the challenge?"

Amduscias stares at him with narrowed eyes. "What indeed?" he says softly, and though Nicke doesn't feel the full strength of that forced sense of loathing and disgust in his mind from the other night, it's not comfortable. It feels like it's sifting through his thoughts, ants crawling through his brain. "What do you fear the most? You must face it and conquer."

Well, that's just annoyingly oblique. But before Nicke can say anything in response to that, there's a low growl, a rumbling from the trees around them. White shapes slink out of the shadows, low to the ground, and did he truly expect anything different? Did he?

Actually. In all honesty, he did.

"Is this really the best you can do?" he asks, even though his heart has started automatically hammering in his chest as soon as he heard the first growl. "Dogs?"

"If you're not afraid of them, do feel free to prove it," Amduscias says.

"I'm afraid of lots of things," Nicke says, and meets his eyes squarely. _Filth, low, worthless, useless, disgusting little creature not worthy of even breathing the same air! _his mind tries to scream at him, but he holds his ground. "But that's not what I'm most afraid of. Not by far."

He turns and deliberately puts his back to the dogs, even though every nerve in his body screams at him not to, to run, run, _run._ He clears his throat and looks Ovi straight in the eye.

"I love you," he says. "I think you love me. For a long time, I didn’t say anything. I don't—I wasn't sure if how you loved me was the way I loved you. I didn't think you loved me as much."

Nicke's fear has never been that Ovi _doesn't_ love him. He knows Ovi does. Ovi loves everyone and everything, the way dogs and babies and drunk college girls in bathrooms do, effusively and without any sense of gravity. It's something Nicke loves helplessly about him, and something he's long despaired over as well. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if he was just something to be casually, lightly held and then easily discarded. It should be enough to know that even if it wasn't exactly what he wanted, that he had some measure of Ovi's love; he thought he had made his peace with it. He could live this way, he'd decided a long time ago. It could work. He didn't have to risk trying for more, and potentially losing it all; he could get by with what he had.

He could. But he doesn't have to. He's just been afraid to ask for it.

"It was a stupid thing to think," he says. Something with fur brushes against the backs of his legs. The growling of the dogs is very loud, but he speaks louder. "I don't know why I was so sure. I didn't—I'm afraid of looking stupid. Of sounding stupid. I didn't want to be the one to say it first. But I am because I'm more afraid of you not knowing it than I am anything else. I love you. I want you to love me the same way I love you."

Ovi stands before him, alternately lit in light and wrapped in shadows as the lights twinkle on, black and red and gold. Nicke thinks, though, of an older memory. He thinks of an early October morning almost ten years ago in Ovi's old house when they were both young, Nicke shuffling down to the kitchen after sleeping over, and finding Ovi at the table. They were going to go to a football game later that day. The kitchen window had been open in deference to the weather that was still warm enough for it, but had a hint of briskness that was just enough to be refreshing. He could smell coffee brewing, even though he knew Ovi doesn't drink it. Ovi was barefoot and still in the shirt and boxers he'd slept in, both hands curled around a mug of tea and staring off into space. His hair was a mess, and he was barely awake, and he'd still made coffee for Nicke.

And that was when Nicke had first thought, _I want this_. That he would like to stay there, forever. In DC, with the Caps, with a longer contract than any of the numbers his agent had kicked around. In that kitchen, with Ovi. Or any kitchen, with Ovi. If he's not in Sweden, he wants this all the time. It had felt simple to realize, one of those few moment where he could see ahead and everything was clear. A simple moment, with nothing extraordinary about it except that bone-deep confidence in knowing he was where he ought to be, what he wanted, and what he needed to do. He'd call his agent and tell him to start working with Ted. He'd sipped at coffee while Ovi had finished waking up, waited and watched Ovi, and gradually he'd thought about more complicated things like what he was going to have to give up and what he'd have to do without, but it had seemed worth it.

"I would rather have to fight a stupid fucking elf lord than talk about my feelings but. Uh. I guess I can do both," Nicke says. "So. Yes. I'm always afraid of losing things. Mostly you. And now you know from me."

Ovi is staring at him, mouth slightly open. There's a dawning look on his face, something wonderous and open. Nicke shrugs and tries to smile. It feels like holding a mouthful of glass shards, but he does it anyway. "Also, I know why you were such a dick to William. That was kinda—well, thanks for that. If Michael comes after me with a shotgun, you have to protect me, though. Since I just confessed all my love to you."

And that's it, that's what makes Ovi throw back his head and laughs loud and joyous. "What, you don't get down on one knee first?" Ovi says. "Also, yes, okay, absolutely," and somehow Nicke finds himself laughing too, so hard that he barely notices the gentle touch on his hand until he looks down and sees the unicorn drawing its horn away, glowing once again.

"The challenge of courage is judged to be won by the champion," Amduscias says, and his voice is full of rage, the sound of hornets buzzing and fires burning and ice crackling deep in the winter. It's horrible, and Nicke sees Christian wince and shove one hand into his pocket, grabbing onto a piece of bread, or a nail, or whatever the hell Brooks had put in there. It still doesn't cloud his joy, and Ovi's hand reaching out to take his in a firm grip is just as strong a charm, if not the strongest.

"My turn now, I guess," Christian says. He waves to Andre in his prison of light, glances at Ovi and Nicke, and then he blows a kiss to Andre as well. Nicke's never been prouder. "It's okay. We're almost done."

"A bold champion," Amduscias says, acid dripping off every word. "How wonderful. I will enjoy snapping your neck in front of your friends and your lover."

"Um," Christian says. "Well, we haven't actually slept—anyway. Let’s go."

"Step forward," Amduscias says, and Christian does, hesitantly. A ring of light forms around them as well, trapping them both inside a circle of about five meters across. Ovi starts forward a few feet, and Nicke joins him, but the unicorn dashes in front of them to block, forcing them back with its horn.

"And now we fight for the challenge of strength," Amduscius says, and he drops his cloak with a theatrical gesture. He towers over Christian, who looks incredibly slight and overmatched beside him. "This challenge is quite simple. We fight in this ring, and the first to go outside the circle loses. Do you understand?"

"That seems simple, yeah," Christian says. He wraps his arms around himself, like he's cold. Nicke can feel the chill licking off the circle of light from where he's standing; he can't imagine what it is to be in the heart of it. "Are we going to start now?"

"Yes. We may begin," Amduscias says. "It is hopeless but go on."

"I know," Christian says, and he pulls out a fucking _handgun_ from the inside pocket of his coat and shoots Amduscias four times in quick succession at point blank range.

The noise is deafening and echoes through the trees. For a moment, they are all frozen.

"You _dare_—" Amduscias manages to whisper, eyes wide open.

Christian takes a couple steps forward to get even closer and shoots him again, four more times, and the force of the bullets sends him reeling backwards and makes him crumple to the grass. Amduscias scrambles to catch himself, one of the few graceless motions Nicke's seen of him, but he lands awkwardly on his side—with one hand outside the circle. Christian points. "You've lost. You're outside the circle. I've won. You have to let Andre go."

"You filthy little _cheat_," Amduscias snarls. He brings one hand up, and there's a red glow starting around it, but the unicorn steps in front of Christian and faces him, snorting. It lowers its head and brandishes its horn in Amduscias's direction, and he winces in pain. He stops, letting his hand drop. "Fine."

Christian hesitantly lifts his hand and strokes the unicorn on its nose. It nuzzles into his hand briefly, and then trots away to where Andre is still standing in his ring of light. It lowers its horn and touches it to the ring. The light flares and disappears, and then Andre is running free across the grass, ripping the wreath of flowers around his neck off and throwing it aside to tackle Christian, who manages to brace himself for this one a little better than before.

"We won!" he whoops, and then he's kissing Christian frantically all over his face, who's kissing him back just as enthusiastically. Christian does end up sitting down with a thump on the grass, Andre in his lap and completely uncaring of his surroundings. Ovi coughs slightly and gives Nicke a meaningful look.

"We won all three challenges," Nicke says, turning to Amduscias, who's climbed back to his feet. Black blood is dripping out of his chest and down his arms, and the look on his face is terrible. "We're going home. Do you uphold your promise and revoke your claim?" Just to be safe, he points the poker at him.

If looks could kill, Nicke would be a damp smear on the ground. For a second, he thinks Amduscias is going to go back on his word, unicorn or no, but Amduscias spits a glob of something black and sticky on the grass and mutters. "I revoke my claim and honor my promise."

In a movie, this would be the triumphant moment, with the sun rising and the background music swelling, and all kinds of special lighting effects. Right now, Nicke just wants to get the hell out while the getting is good and before anyone starts making dramatic speeches. "Fine. We're leaving. Come on, boys."

He gets one arm under Andre's and pulls him up off Christian; Ovi bodily picks up Christian and puts him on his feet, and then they fucking _book it_ down the hill and towards the path they'd come up.

"What the fucking hell," Nicke says as they sprint, "where did you get that gun? How did you get the idea?"

"From Beags," Christian manages to gasp out. "You said—we should—cheat. If we could. And Beags was right. The first time. When we had the meeting. Why not just shoot. It’s our world. Our weapons."

"God. Fuck. He's never gonna shut up about this," Nicke says.

"He also had a crossbow," Christian says, panting. "I couldn’t hide it under my coat. He uses it—to hunt—deer."

"Djooser, you get_ all_ the rookie points," Ovi promises as the gate comes into view. "And full sushi and hibachi dinner. Every week. On me."

"I love you," Andre gasps. "When we get back, we're gonna fuck so many times. All _over _my apartment. Or Ovi's place, first."

They're about ten meters away from the gate when there's a shimmer in the air and the unicorn manifests right in front of them, blocking the gate. As a group; they skid to a halt and nearly end up in a heap. Nicke tightens his grip on the fire poker, which he's managed to hold onto this whole time. It's beautiful. It kept Amduscias from breaking his word, he thinks. He will still club the everliving hell out of it if that's the only way to get all four of them past it and through the gate.

But all the unicorn does is walk up to each of them. It nuzzles Ovi's hip. It licks Nicke's arm. It lays its head against Christian's side, and it leans against Andre last, resting its head close to its heart. Andre strokes it, one hand resting on its forehead, near the horn. And then it steps aside and lets them go.

"Goodbye, Charlie," Andre says, and then they're tumbling through the gate and it's Ovi's asphalt driveway beneath their feet and the sky is pink with dawn. They're here, they're safe, they're home. They _won_.

"Fuck, I want to sleep more than anything," Andre says. He grabs Christian's hand. "Almost more than anything."

"No, I want to sleep too," Christian says. "I think it's still Halloween? It feels like early morning. We can do sex stuff later, after we sleep. I mean, and other stuff, we'll do that too. But also sex stuff."

"We can still have Halloween party," Ovi says. "I'll Surfer Bird team when we get back to house. Now, go away. I want to kiss Backy. It’s weird in front of the kids."

Nicke doesn't wait for the kids to go on ahead. He just grabs Ovi and kisses him first, aiming for his mouth with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and there's no hesitation as Ovi grabs him back for the same. The marigold corsage is crushed between them, and it smells clean and bitter and autumnal. There are other things jabbing him, all kinds of weird lumps from all the stuff Brooks tucked into their clothes that he can feel with Ovi in his arms, and that Ovi must feel as well. Ovi accidentally steps on his foot. Nicke bites Ovi's lip. It's still the best kiss of his life and it feels like it's been coming forever, since they stood on a stage together over ten years ago and shook hands for the first time. He's _happy_, just wildly, incandescently happy. And he's not afraid.

He could get used to it, Nicke decides.

"So," Nicke says, as they walk back through the driveway to the Ovi's house, once they've managed to stop kissing. All the team's cars are still there, so they must be waiting, no need to call them after all. "Do you want to wear couple costumes to the Halloween party tonight?"

**Author's Note:**

> William Nylander has an unrequited crush on Nicklas Backstrom, and gets non-fatally stabbed by a unicorn while on an arranged sex date with Andre Burakovsky. He does not bone either of them. I probably owe you an epilogue of what happens at the Halloween party.
> 
> I played around with the 2017-2018 schedule a bit; if you know the exact order and outcome of each regular season game, uh, please look past that, and also, what the hell, tell me how you do that; I can barely remember what happened last week.
> 
> The Mexican magical realism camera concept is from Achewood, [here](https://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=09262006) and [here](https://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07312006).


End file.
